By the Rivers of Babylon (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Antonio Lobo Antunes, Margaret Jull Costa (Translated by)

$26.00

Publication Date: April 25th, 2023

Publisher:

Yale University Press

ISBN:

9780300233414

Pages:

248

Description

A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal’s most celebrated writers

“One of the essential writers of our tormented times.”—Alberto Manguel, Times Literary Supplement

“Little prepares one for this extraordinary book, in which each chapter, covering a single day, and lasting a single sentence, offers a teeming stream of consciousness. . . . Even pain is alive, and alive is the word for this book, alive and enduring.”— Michael Autrey, Booklist

Incapacitated after the removal of a malignant tumor, the narrator, António, spends his days in a Lisbon hospital enduring the humiliations of severe illness. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he revisits fragments of his life and the people who passed through it. He recalls the village where he lived as a child near the Mondego River amid the eucalyptus and pines, his parents and grandparents and their tight-knit community of potato farmers and tungsten miners, and the woman he loved—an unexpected polyphony of voices and places sounding in sharp counterpoint to debilitating pain.

By the Rivers of Babylon conjures the past and the present all at once, revealing the power of memory to embolden us in the face of extraordinary suffering. This is António Lobo Antunes’s homage to the beauty of a cherished life in its confrontation with imminent death.

About the Author

António Lobo Antunes, born in Lisbon and trained as a psychiatrist, is the author of more than thirty books. He lives in Portugal. Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over thirty years. She lives in Leicester, UK.

Praise for By the Rivers of Babylon (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

“Regarded as a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. . . . The future tense is hopefully prescient, because [Lobo Antunes] is one of the essential writers of our tormented times.”—Alberto Manguel, Times Literary Supplement

“Arguably the greatest living Portuguese writer. . . . This work has undeniable literary merit.”—Lawrence Olszewski, Library Journal

“Little prepares one for this extraordinary book, in which each chapter, covering a single day, and lasting a single sentence, offers a teeming stream of consciousness. . . . Even pain is alive, and alive is the word for this book, alive and enduring.”—Michael Autrey, Booklist

“A haunting and lyrical work by one of Portugal’s most acclaimed writers.”—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“By the Rivers of Babylon is like a dialogue between a man confronting death and his childhood self, a being who can’t even conceive of dying. . . . As always, it is a pleasure to be buoyed along by Lobo Antunes’s writing, as if floating along the Mondego River, whose headwaters young António would visit with his grandfather in the Serra da Estrela in the summer, when death was still something that happened to other people.”—Alex Lanz, Full Stop

“At work here in the fields of Joyce, Lobo Antunes uses a rolling, swirling syntax to capture the actual movements of human consciousness. His lightly punctuated sentences run forward and loop on themselves almost without pause, sweeping this reader along through an intense mental journey and leaving him amazed and enlightened. By the Rivers of Babylon is a remarkable literary accomplishment.”—Billy Collins

“By the Rivers of Babylon is another stunning achievement by Lobo Antunes, expertly rendered by the multi-gifted Jull Costa. Reading this bold meditation on Eros and Thanatos you are firmly in the presence of permanence, of the great god Literature.”—William Giraldi, author of American Audacity

Praise for António Lobo Antunes:

“One of the living writers who will matter most.”—Harold Bloom

“A novelist of the very first rank.”—George Steiner

“A master navigator of the human psyche.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Perhaps Portugal’s greatest living author . . . a genius.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“One of the most skillful psychological portraitists writing anywhere.”—New Yorker