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?