Description

From literary master Antóoacute;nio Lobo Antunes, comes a richly textured and multi-vocal tale of two families and the secrets that bind them.

In The Natural Order of Things, a diabetic teenage girl in a Lisbon apartment complex is kept awake by the whispered childhood memories of the middle-aged civil servant lover she despises. Her father, once a miner in South Africa, is now reduced to dreams of "flying underground." An officer in the pre-revolutionary army is tortured in prison on charges of conspiracy, plagued by memories of his illegitimate sister, locked away to live as a ghost in the attic like Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre. A secret policeman, who has abandoned his sanity to teach hypnotism by correspondence course, unwittingly holds the key to their secret histories.

The voices in The Natural Order of Things create a portrait of a disintegrating Portugal and a personal political history that attains the brilliance of Elias Canetti and Nikolai Gogol.