Antonio Lobo Antunes

Word by word, sentence by sentence, António Lobo Antunes is a great writer. He catches like no one else the flavour of the spoken word, his prose is full of gripping metaphors, he can be wonderfully funny and sardonic. And yet, I doubt whether he is great novelist. His novels lack structure and plot, the story line is weak and the unfortunate result is the reader's boredom. He seems to me a self-indulgent writer, who loses himself in the voluptuousness of style. His characters move in a haze of unbridled stream of consciousness from which an action rarely emerges. Although his vision of Portugal can be ferocious, his characters often seem oddly sentimental, especially when they are full of despair. It seems as if this scion of the "haute bourgeoisie" is endlessly fascinated by the "petite bourgeoisie". His whole novelistic world is made of bitterness and frustration, his characters are always constrained by a hostile, morose and petty social reality.  Is Portugal really like this?

Tristan and Isolde

My friend João Pedro Garcia, who is a devout opera buff and spends his weekends travelling the world to catch the very best performances, invited me and my wife, as a wedding present, to join him in Milan for Tristan and Isolde, with Daniel Barenboim in the podium and "mise en scène" by Patrice Chéreau. I, who like to spend my weekends at home, had often wondered how he could withstand the strain of so much travelling after a hard workweek. Now I think I understand a little better. Opera at this level is consoling, overwhelming, elating - I am short of adverbs for describing the deep emotional and artistic satisfaction I took in this show. For hours, I sat entranced, watching the slow build up of each act to its powerful climax, sometimes moved to tears by the drama. Everything fell together, the music and the action fused in a seamless whole, just as Wagner had intended it. This is, indeed, the only way to enjoy Wagner: in the theater. And as I left La Scala, it occurred to me that never since the Greeks invented the tragedy had anything been created for the stage  with the same capacity to move an audience as a Wagner opera.