The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Return of the Caravels by António Lobo Antunes Trans. Gregory RabassaChad W. Post
António Lobo Antunes. The Return of the Caravels. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Grove, 2002. 210 pp. $24.00
One of Antunes’s slimmest books, The Return of the Caravels is also one of his most ambitious and most distinctly Portuguese. Constructed from Portugal’s history, the plot centers around several famous explorers and colonists who are returning to a Lixbon that is both stuck in the seventeenth century and strangely modern. Caterpillar tractors block traffic while workmen illuminate their stores with cane-wick candles. Iraqi tankers are anchored next to caravels. Despite this apparent fluidity, the events in the novel also take place at a very specific time, 1974, following Portugal’s socialist revolution and the granting of independence to Angola. The return of the colonists from Africa is the occasion for the novel, an exploration of the decrepit state of a fatherland without order, without glory, without money, and most importantly, without heroes. For instance, Vasco de Gama and King Dom Manoel are arrested and sent to an insane asylum despite the King’s continual protests that “all this crap belongs to me,” Diogo Cão is hired as a water inspector and ends up a drunken lout searching for nymphs in the Tagus, and Pedro Álvares Cabral’s wife deserts him after becoming a prostitute to work off his debts. Throughout it all Luis Camões pens his epic poem The Lusiads, to which The Return of the Caravels owes its unique style. The novel can be a difficult read if one doesn’t recognize (or research) the importance of the figures from Portugal’s past, but these characters exists outside of their historical significances and thus are accessible to all readers. One can, and should, read The Return of the Caravels for its depiction of a crumbling empire—where the heroic actions of the colonists have been replaced by the monopolistic tendencies of the businessman—its sarcastic bursts of humor and its depressing, yet touching scenes, that combine in such a deft fashion as to reaffirm Antunes’s reputation as one of the great contemporary writers. [Chad W. Post]