The author of some twenty novels, eight of which are available in English, Antonio Lobo Antunes is one of Portugal's most eminent writers and the recipient of numerous literary awards. He is also a psychiatrist, having practised for many years at Lisbon's Hospital Miguel Bombarda. He is thus both a scientific and artistic explorer of the soul; and after reading Knowledge of Hell it is clear which impulse he prefers.

First published in 1980 as Conhecimento do inferno, now translated into English for the first time, this is a howl at the lunacy of psychiatric medicine, characterized as a farce of "rich clowns tyrannizing the poor clowns". Antunes was apparently pushed into the profession by his father (himself a medic who once treated the Portuguese dictator Salazar); Freudians (who are derided in this novel) might call this gilded polemic Oedipal. Gilded it certainly is: Antunes is well known for the density of his prose, the languor of his imagery, the volume of his similes. Here he has produced a breathless yet sleepy book, rich in poetry (often glutinously so), ethereal and evasive in its merging of metaphor and plot, as though art, too, fails to explain the world.

The action (such as it is) opens on the Algarve - a troubling venue for those losing their grip on reality. The place seems constructed from "theater scenery"; its tourists are served "make-believe drinks in nonexistent glasses". Warming to his theme, Antunes has them tautologically lubricate themselves with "pretend make-believe creams under an orange-colored spotlight operated by an invisible electrician from a hole in the clouds". "Plastic people" look out to the "cardboard sea", across "sawdust" sand, framed by a "hoax of backdrops", under flocks of "calligraphic" birds. The grass is "varnished", the houses "marzipan", and the radishes hyperreal: "like enormous molars sunk into the sour gums of their skin". Even something as tangible as a drain is deemed "unlikely".

Our narrator, who slips between the first and third person, is returning from an un- settling holiday on the coast. He is driving back to Lisbon where he dreads the start of another terrible week at the asylum. As the journey continues, the faux-landscape narrative fades into fragments of his dreamlike (and nightmarish) mindscape. Interspersed among his bitterly intense observations are memories of his time doing military service during the Portuguese-Angolan war, outpourings to his absent daughter and rants about the uselessness of his profession. The narrator's name is Antonio Lobo Antunes.

"Antonio" decided to be a psychiatrist "in order to live among the distorted men like the ones who visit us in dreams". Angola (where his author also served) is full of atrocious memories but "at least in war things are simple". "Knowledge of hell" must be sought in men's minds. "Contact with the crazies", it is suggested, might be contagious. Worse, the whole thing is a sham: at best, a "slapstick" of pill-dispensing (Antunes was prescient in 1980, given the current Prozac debate); at worst, a "polite [form] of killing". The psychiatrist is the "lay priest" of his day: a respected authority dependent on "the faithful" pretending to help people, but succeeding only in diverting their attention: "I prescribe tranquilizers, the way a person shuts up the ringing of a phone by burying it under a pillow". The conclusion is stark: "all of us should have been dentists".

Antunes's prose is sometimes so pumped up that we wonder if we are being mocked. And if not us then who, or what? A fan doesn't merely turn but "expelled in his direction the gentle warm breath of a diabetic prompter"; letters are not posted but "introduced into the post-box slot" (Clifford E. Landers's translation takes pains to preserve Antunes's loquaciousness). Similes are vague, but sure of themselves: loneliness "isn't the trace of lipstick revealed on a glass in the empty office lit by blinds": au contraire, it "is a child's gun in a plastic bag". Often the metaphors overreach. An index finger is "as wooden as a sharpened stick". Are sharpened sticks more wooden than blunt, or bevelled, ones? Women, inevitably, bear the brunt of the imagery. Petals open "like thighs at the gynecologist"; the "warm wind" is also "like a woman's thigh", though the waves are "a great maternal breast". There is a bold, Rochesterian elan to the terrified descriptions of sex: "she will devour me, in bed, with the gigantic mandibles of her vagina, forcing me to sweat over her gelatinous body the calisthenics of resigned despondency".

At times brilliantly mellifluous, at times unreadable, Knowledge of Hell can be surprisingly rewarding; but it is never for the queasy.

Antonio Lobo Antunes
KNOWLEDGE OF HELL
Translated by Clifford E. Landers.
298pp. Dalkey Archive Press. Paperback, £8.99.
978 1 5647 8436 0

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