Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Award-winning author António Lobo Antunes returns to the subject of the Portuguese colonial war in Angola with a vigorous account of atrocity and vengeance. Drawing on his own bitter experience as a soldier stationed for twenty-seven months in Angola, Lobo Antunes tells the story of a young African boy who is brought to Portugal by one of the soldiers who destroyed the child’s village, and of the boy’s subsequent brutal murder of this adoptive father figure at a ritual pig killing. Deftly framing the events through an assembly of interwoven narratives and perspectives, this is one of Lobo Antunes’s most captivating and experimental books. It is also a timely consideration of the lingering wounds that remain from the conflict between European expansionism and its colonized victims who were forced to accept the norms of a supposedly supposedly superior culture.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
António Lobo Antunes returns to the subject of the Portuguese colonial war in Angola with a vigorous account of atrocity and vengeance. It is a book that returns to the War in a moving way and full of crossroads. It is our nominee this year because we believe that we should never let forget the feelings and stories lived for so many during those years of war. Even if sometimes, for the reader there is a fine line between reality and fiction. Porto Public Libraries, Portugal