The Land at the End of the World

The brutal war that the Portuguese waged against their rebellious African colony Angola in the early 1970s turned Portugal's self-image as a bearer of civilization on its head. Now the author of 20 novels, Lobo Antunes (b. 1942) was a medic in Angola between 1971 and 1973, and the horrors of his experience provided the theme of his earliest novels, including this, his second, published in 1979. What readers find here is a confession to a lonely and unnamed lover by the narrator, for whom the bloodshed of the Angolan battlefields has expanded to create an entire world in putrefaction. In Luanda, shimmering shabbily in the African heat and humidity, he courts whores in tawdry cabarets while awaiting passage to the combat zone, where he will bandage amputees, debride wounds, and rotate tourniquets.