The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Natural Order of Things by António Lobo Antunes
Chad W. Post

António Lobo Antunes. The Natural Order of Things. Trans. Richard Zenith. Grove Press, 2000. 298 pp. $25.00.

António Lobo Antunes’s previous books have earned him comparisons to almost every literary master of the twentieth century—writers as diverse as Dos Passos, Céline, García Márquez, and Cormac McCarthy. This newly translated novel will likely have the same results, with Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury the most apt comparison. Lobo Antunes has a deft touch in creating a tapestry of voices out of the jumbled interior monologues of his characters. In a piecemeal fashion, jumping from character to character across a span of over forty years, The Natural Order of Things recounts the disintegration of two families. As the novel progresses, Lobo Antunes foregrounds the theme of isolation in the plot, providing a touchstone for the reader to understand each character’s separate history. A young man is separated from his family when he is arrested on charges of political conspiracy; his illegitimate half-sister is shunned by the family and locked in an attic with her record player; a former miner relives his past life and loves, convinced that he can fly underground; and the son of the “madwoman in the attic” connects the two families when he falls in love with the miner’s daughter and spends his nights whispering the secrets of his youth to her silent back. Although the idea that entropy is the natural order of things is invoked through the sordid events and desolate images that dominate this book, the hopeful optimism of Lobo Antunes’s writing is affirmed through splashes of comedy and magical coincidences. [Chad W. Post]