The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Inquisitors’ Manual, by António Lobo Antunes, translated by Richard Zenith
reviewed by Chad W. Post

António Lobo Antunes. The Inquisitors’ Manual. Trans. Richard Zenith. Grove, 2003. 435 pp. $25.00.

Bearing a certain resemblance to The Sound and the Fury, Antunes’s most recent novel to be published in English recounts the fall of a Portuguese family in the time preceding and following the 1974 revolution. The plot revolves around Senhor Francisco, a minister during Salazar’s reign, who abuses his power, rapes his milkmaid, is deserted by his wife, goes insane after the revolution, almost drinks himself to death, and ends up in a hospital with a nurse endlessly repeating, “wee-wee, it’s time for wee-wee, who made a nice wee-wee, who was it?” His plight, and that of those who surround him, consists of five reports told to an unnamed—and generally unobtrusive—inquisitor researching Senhor Francisco’s family for a book he’s writing. Five characters directly impacted by the family’s decline narrate these reports: Francisco’s son João, their maid Titinia, Francisco’s illegitimate daughter, his mistress, and Francisco himself. Each report is expanded upon—sometimes touchingly, sometimes sarcastically—with “commentaries” from a cast of minor characters. An indictment of Salazar’s reign, this novel powerfully portrays the hopelessness of Portugal’s lower classes, a situation that sadly doesn’t seem to improve much after the revolution, when the already rich take advantage of the chaos and the poor find another decrepit apartment to live in. Like Antunes’s other works, this isn’t just a political novel, nor is it a tragedy of the human situation. In contrast to Faulkner, Antunes realizes that the misery of his characters can be quite funny. Antunes’s grasp of the workings of his characters’ minds is amazing, as in the situation of the veterinarian who organizes his life in order to see young girls arriving at school (the principal eventually files charges) and the way João’s mother-in-law’s comment—“Are you a moron, young man, or are you just pretending?”—infiltrates his being like a sadistic mantra. The overarching plot of this book is as flimsy as the premise that an inquisitor is gathering all of this material, but that really isn’t the point. The Inquisitors’ Manual will be remembered for the voices of its characters (which Richard Zenith captures so well) and the dark humor that emerges from the conflict between their desires and the hopelessness of their situations.