Que farei quando tudo arde?

by António Lobo Antunes

Décimo quinto romance de António Lobo Antunes, este livro é narrado por Paulo, o filho de um travesti ("Quis escrever um livro sobre a identidade, fazendo várias interrogações que se colocam de um modo especial num travesti.", Lobo Antunes em entrevista à Visão).
O título, "Que Farei Quando Tudo Arde", é o último verso de um soneto de Sá de Miranda e, na altura em que o livro sai, não poderia ser mais actual. Como actual é o que se passa dentro do romance (o antepenúltimo, segundo o autor: "Só quero escrever mais dois romances."), continuando Lobo Antunes a fazer um retrato do país."Quando tudo arde".

Genres: Fiction, Portugal, Portuguese Literature, Literature, Ebooks, Collections, Romance

637 pages

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

At the age of seven, António Lobo Antunes decided to be a writer but when he was 16, his father sent him to medical school - he is a psychiatrist. During this time he never stopped writing.
By the end of his education he had to join the Army, to take part in the war in Angola, from 1970 to 1973. It was there, in a military hospital, that he gained interest for the subjects of death and the other. The Angolan war for independence later became subject to many of his novels. He worked many months in Germany and Belgium.

In 1979, Lobo Antunes published his first novel - Memória de Elefante (Elephant's Memory), where he told the story of his separation. Due to the success of his first novel, Lobo Antunes decided to devote his evenings to writing. He has been practicing psychiatry all the time, though, mainly at the outpatient's unit at the Hospital Miguel Bombarda of Lisbon.

His style is considered to be very dense, heavily influenced by William Faulkner, James Joyce and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
He has an extensive work, translated into several languages. Among the many awards he has received so far, in 2007 he received the Camões Award, the most prestigious Portuguese literary award.

Reviews

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

In "Que Farei Quando Tudo Arde?", the carnivalization of man reaches the extreme, together with the criticism of the values ​​and norms dictated by Western society and, notably, by Portuguese culture. In the novel presented here, the reader faces a picture of total human laceration.
Paulo conducts the narrative of a young heroin addict admitted to a hospital. All this protagonist wants is to have a "normal" life, as his reality clashes with social standards.
But what bothers him so much? We would ask at first. As the reader immerses himself in Paulo's universe, he realizes that numerous external factors contribute to the character's sad fate: the transvestite, to which he attributes his paternity, is not his father, but in the end, he ends up being; his mother is an alcoholic and prostitutes herself in exchange for pine cones, shells and at best a coin; his maternal grandmother does not recognize him as a grandson and the parents themselves experience a mixture of acceptance and repulsion towards his person.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

António Lobo Antunes is an outstanding literary experimentalist and his novel What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? is one of those ‘Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing’ tales…

…the river tomorrow as I say goodbye to the doctor, today the yard and the fence, a friendly cigarette, a coin for a friendly cup of coffee, I’m not a patient, friend, they’ve imprisoned me here, the basket of peaches abandoned by the plane tree, Mr. Couceiro helped me with my suitcase, clothes, slippers, a poster of my father in an evening gown that I hadn’t even remembered bringing with me…

The narration is terribly polyphonic but all those voices are like voices in the head so to read the novel is like to assemble an immense jigsaw puzzle picture out of tiny pieces.
Voices are many but they all turn around a single person…

Now that my father’s dead I think I’ve begun looking for him but I’m not sure. I’m not sure. I keep turning it over and over and the answer I get is I’m not sure. It all seems so hard to me, so complicated, so strange, a clown who was a man and a woman at the same time or a man sometimes and a woman other times or a kind of man sometimes and a kind of woman other times with me thinking
—What am I supposed to call him?

The central figure is somewhat like a shade of Tiresias abiding in Hades for which in the book stands the hell of the contemporary megalopolis…

…basement clubs with steps down into the darkness and at the bottom of the stairs music, dancers, lots of beer, the candy woman
Dona Amélia
with a tray of candy, perfume, and American tobacco, the paradise of the pure of heart, homosexuals, addicts, depressives, transvestites, lesbians, and lonely people like me who’d lost their ideal thirty-five years ago…

In modern times, the miserable differ from Les Misérables of Victor Hugo but they are born to the endless night all the same.

[Glenn Russell]

Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes, Born 1942

What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? is a demanding novel. It is, using the vocab of critic Dustin Illingworth, an anti-realist novel. Dustin goes on to say about this type of novel: "These fictions do not purport to be projections of some sedate, agreed-upon reality. Instead, they suggest the secret dream-life of a culture, harnessing its most intimate fantasies and anxieties."

Here is critic Will Blythe's artful review that appeared in the New York Times back in 2008, the year the novel was translated by none other than the great Gregory Rabassa.

WHAT CAN I DO WHEN EVERYTHING’S ON FIRE? by António Lobo Antunes

There are novels out there as vertiginous as the dread K2, steep with degrees of difficulty that put readers into the same position as mountaineers staring at a terrifying traverse. They can only hope that the view from the top will be worth the rigors of the ascent. Other­wise, everyone might as well return to base camp, tuck into their mummy bags and read detective novels by flashlight while sucking on bottles of the finest oxygen.

“What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?,” by the Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes, is such a novel. The author of nearly 20 works of fiction, many not yet available in English, Antunes is said by some readers, including his translator, Gregory Rabassa, to be at least the equal of his countryman, the Nobel laureate José Saramago. Ominous, whirling, repetitive to the point of exhaustion, the newly translated novel centers around the figure of Carlos, a female impersonator who abandons his wife, Judite, and his son, Paulo, who serves as the book’s principal but by no means exclusive point of view.

Son and wife are inconvenient — why not say it: a drag on Carlos’s life in Lisbon’s demimonde, an Iberian melodrama of wigs and camisoles, makeup and falsies, nightclubs and assignations. And also of suicide, murder, alcoholism, drug addiction and disease. If coming upon a father applying mascara and padding his buttocks isn’t confusing enough to an impressionable boy, Paulo must also endure a mother who in her disappointment and poverty drinks heavily and sleeps with local merchants, discharging her debts while sending her son outside to play.

For all of its high modernist stylings, “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” is the soapiest of operas, a frozen bubble bath of hysteria that comes complete with a dramatis personae featuring 16 drag queens in order of appearance. If in American popular culture, drag queens, pitching their sassy quips against the hetero and clueless, have become the embodiment of an oracular, salty and utterly harmless wisdom, these Lisbon divas are portrayed as mocked, downtrodden outsiders compelled to hide their sashay in the closet next to the high heels. The disembodied refrain “faggot”follows them throughout the text.

As a drag queen, Carlos is not well suited to the demands of fatherhood, which tend to get in the way of primping. He asks his son, “Why can’t they let me be a woman like other women?” As a child, Paulo begs his father to play piggyback. “The spangles don’t upset me,” he says. Judite repeatedly addresses her own despairing questions to her husband. “Do you wear this, Carlos?” And “Why Carlos? . . . Why Carlos?”

Wounded and inadequate as parents, Carlos and Judite give Paulo to a couple who’ve lost a child to illness. The old man has disappeared into memories of the Second World War, his wife into fantasies of their late daughter. Together, they make weekly pilgrimages to her grave. Paulo returns their affections by desecrating their prized photograph of the girl. “I’m all you have and I detest you,” he tells them. In time, he also steals, shoots heroin with his father’s boyfriend, Rui, seduces a cafeteria worker during his stay at the asylum and hangs out with the bad crowd inside his head.

He is not a particularly companionable narrator. The world is not much to his taste. Like even the minor characters of this novel, of which there are many, he is trying, at great length and against all odds, to piece together the shards of his grim destiny. His views are acrid, unsparing. He does not miss a trick, as it were. In his mind, he taunts his father. “Do you want your wig, father, your lipstick, your creams, do you want me to put the music on, applaud you, bring you the gold dress and the feather stole for your final glory?”

As a monologuist of fractured rants, Paulo, like a Presbyterian preacher, proceeds to tell readers what he’s about to tell them, then tells them, then tells them what he just told them for about 400 or so more pages. Obsession has its splendors mainly when it’s your own.

And that’s the primary problem with “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” The book is an excellent embodiment of the nature of obsession without being a particularly good dramatization of it. This means that chapter by chapter, not only can you step into the same river twice (the River Tagus here), you can even drown in it an infinite number of times. No one escapes the traumas that compress his or her histories into a single eternal point. You don’t so much observe the characters in action as overhear them muttering to themselves. Were the neighbor­hoods of Lisbon not so pungently presented, a reader would feel trapped, as if within the featureless claustrophobia of a Beckett novel.

The book is a welter of discordant voices, erupting out of the ether of the white page like ghost-murmurs at a séance. Every character is buffeted by them, the voices come from all directions and even mingle with one another a most unholy cacopho­ny. How could fate have been unkind to so many? Whether dead or emotionally distressed, the characters recycle their grievances of lost love and unappeasable hungers. Again and again: “Why Carlos?”

Their heads are filled with the cries of sirens, but there’s no mast to which they can tie themselves, no pilot to sail the ship out of earshot. Consciousness, with its implacable yammering, is apparently infernal torture indeed — other than oblivion, there’s nowhere to go. How do you abandon your own mind?

The narrative keeps circling Lisbon, looking for a place to land. And in a sense, it never does. Development, resolution are forever denied. Characters die, kill themselves and go mad, over and over again. Nautilus, whirlpool, galaxy: this is a novel that spirals around the same events at ever greater speeds. Antunes has written a book in which everything is happening at once. We experience the book’s concentric motion as William Faulkner described time: “There was no yesterday and no tomorrow, it all is this moment.”

Indeed, Faulkner presides over “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” as a tutelary spirit. Here, for instance, is a legendary sentence, spoken by a death-­befuddled child, from “As I Lay Dying,” published in 1930: “My mother is a fish.”And here, uttered by a baffled son, is a sentence from “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?”: “You’ve turned into a fish, father.” Like Faulkner in his great novels of the ’30s, Antunes deploys idiot monologues, garrulous, colloquial voices, superheated atmospherics and dismembered narratives that exalt not-knowing as a prime literary excitement.

To Antunes’s credit, he refuses to take for granted the novel as a form. He writes as if it were a fresh invention, as if the many innovations of the last century — stream of consciousness, for one — were his for the taking. At liberty to annotate his own story’s composition, Paulo praises the nib of his pen: “Clearer and clearer, the scribbling as the metal gets rid of a piece of dirt . . . and the piece of dirt is imprisoned in a blue strain, another way of writing, telling a story . . . what story? Mine too maybe mine or the reverse of mine.”

Does Antunes risk what the critic Harold Bloom calls “belatedness,” that sense that what he’s doing has already been done — and quite well — before? Most likely. It is impossible not to read his dense, difficult prose in the light of his illustrious predecessors. But then most things have been done well before, and that’s hardly reason to stop doing them. The hunt for originality as a virtue in its own right often results in anxious palaver. Reading “What Can I Do When Every­thing’s on Fire?” in this jaded epoch is a little like watching your child learn how to ride a bicycle. Of course, you’ve ridden a bike yourself many years before and it shouldn’t feel new, but as you watch your daughter wobble down the street for the first time, you feel again the thrill of her new glide in your old bones.

[withdrawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not for the timid. I've been putting off finishing this book for fear of writing a review. It will come. I need to sleep on it.

_________________

I've slept on it. This review will be done by instalment. I'll never get it out in one coherent text.

It is a solid 4 out of 5.
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So this is the story of a family living outside of Lisbon in Portugal - although there is a great deal of moving around. (I thought I knew a lot about Lisbon from reading all that Saramago. I was wrong.)
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The family is made up of a father (Carlos), a mother (Judite), and their son (Paulo). Paulo is the central character and the story is told through his eyes or mind except when it's not and is seen through the eyes or mind of any one of a dozen or so other characters.
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Warning, if you read this book you will be spending a lot of time puzzling over whose eyes or mind you are seeing the story through at any given moment.
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The basic story revolves around the father, who probably isn't the biological father (I suspect the electrician but I don't think even Judite is sure.), reveals himself to be a transvestite and moves into Lisbon to become an 'entertainer' named Soraia in a club. Everything goes down hill from there.
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After that it's your basic story of pain, decadence, drug addiction, mental hospital, perversion, child molestation, sadism, heartbreaking memories of childhood innocence (the toy car with the wooden wheels) and the like. As the story is based on memories being described over a period of time, there is also a great deal of repetition and contradiction.
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Now that I've revealed the basic plot, I'll stop while I regroup and prepare to let you know why I 'liked' this book. More to come.
____________

So now: Why I liked 'What Can I do When Everything's on Fire'.

The experience of reading the book is one of confusion (where are we? who's speaking? when is this happening?); one of pain and horror and general sadness; one where the reader is continually frustrated by the self-destructive behaviour of all of the characters. Nobody is ever granted a reprieve. No one will ever find salvation. And finally, there is not the slightest possibility of hope. Never. Pain and anguish shall prevail. So what's not to like?

When I read Carole Maso's brilliant novel, 'Defiance', I found myself immediately empathizing with her. Whatever the reason for her monstrous behaviour, for her fatal, suicidal decisions, I knew who she was. Here, in Antonio Lobo Antunes novel of complete despair, my empathy came only in starts and stops. Images of a child with his toy, of a father trying to tend his garden, of a woman showing off her ring to her colleagues all bring forward those basic human feelings, only to have them become the child trying to smash his toy in frustration, the garden overgrown (did it really exist?) and the ring and the marriage lost forever. Mostly I feel the pain but I'm frustrated by not understanding the nature of the destruction.

It is only by plodding through the confusion and identifying the voices, the places and the times that the reader begins to really understand the helplessness of all of the characters. As with Maso's book, it all begins with an act of sexual abuse of a child which grows and festers like an infected boil that can't be reached and is beyond any possible treatment. But this can only be understood by staying with the characters and digging into their personas.

Antonio Lobo Antunes worked as a psychiatrist. One senses his questioning and pushing his patients to find their own truths in their camouflaged confusion. He forces them to vomit up the built-up lifetime of bile to try to bring them to understanding. The reader is left to ride along as a listener in the next room, never quite sure. And, as is often the case with lifelong mental deviance, there seems to be no cure. The psychiatrist must fail. He, with the reader in tow, can make sense of it in the end, but there is no cure.

Like a series of Greek tragedies or perhaps Shakespeare's Hamlet, some sort of final justice is sought to bring the world back into balance. In this case, we wait in vain for Hamlet to die, as he must. He refuses.

Why do I like this book? Because, after much effort, I have engaged my empathy. I am no longer impatient with the swirling madness of it all. What is portrayed is a modern tragedy. As with all successful modern tragedies, and there are few, the root of it all lies with sexuality, the root of all evil. WE are but emotional children who have no idea as to what we are as sexual beings. We keep pretending that the mark of humanity is rationality, homo sapiens. Piffle. Let us suffer.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Antonio Lobo Antunes is the other great modern novelist of Portugal, somewhat the antithesis of the Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago and his fables. Lobo Antunes is, if everything, too much of this world. "What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire", despite the irresistible title, is a tough read. Not because it is poorly written -- in fact, because the writing is so virtuosic. Like "The Sound and the Fury", this novel begins with a narrator who cannot tell a story. Unlike "The Sound and the Fury", a coherent narrator never appears. This is a tale of memory told with the shifting ground of real memory. The narrator, the son of Lisbon's most famous drag queen, remembers his parents and his father's lovers, and the unbearably chaotic world they inhabited. It is a tour de force, never losing its voice. Lobo Antunes is a psychiatrist and it is apparent that he is close terms with those who have mental illness. It is also a reminder that impassioned and lyrical virtuosity often comes at the expense of a story.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a complicated read, sometimes frustrating, but worth plowing through. Antunes disorients the reader. At its base, it is about drag queens & drug addicts and life's difficulties.

The list of characters is essential; at points they are the sole compass, other than place names, to get a bearing on the time-line, narrator and action. The main narrator, Paulo, directs the bulk of the novel, while other characters have a say throughout. It deals somewhat indirectly with the issues of dysfunctional families, attachment, abandonment, loneliness, uncertainty with identity and disorientation in life mainly at the hands of alcohol and heroin and all of the above. I say indirectly, because this is not a novel that plainly states what the cause or consequences of the action are. It is depressing reading each character scraping through a mostly miserable existence. Constant repetition creates a flurry of "dialogue", scenes, histories, characters and their disconnected and ruminative thoughts.

For me it was haunting at its best, and confusing at its worst. It was ultimately enjoyable despite the weight in the style & substance. It deserves a future re-reading.

[Michael sinkofcabbages · Rating 5 out of 5]

should have the Nobel by now.

[Lindsey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Though parts of this novel were very lyrically beautiful, the whole concept seemed pretty pointless and I had a really difficult time getting through it, so much so that I often referred to it as "drivel" and "that dumb novel I'm still slogging through". But I finished it! So I am kind of impressed with myself. Basically, Atunes creates, say, fifteen characters and over the course of almost 600 pages switches back and forth between their first-person narratives, usually without any sort of warning, and with almost no shift in voice. Everything is written cyclicly with repeated passages and pull-quotes (and when I say repeated, i mean over and over, throughout specific chapters, and usually in more than one chapter). I think there are about seven punctuation marks in the entire novel unless you include dashes which supposedly denote dialogue, but there really isn't dialogue. Mostly the novel is narrated from the perspective of the heroin addicted son of a dead drag queen whose mother was driven to insanity, alcoholism, and prostitution by the embarrassment of her husband dressing in women's clothing. So while I can understand Atunes' emphasis on delirium, his free-association didn't suit every single character. There were chapters in which I could not even identify which character was speaking, or why. This novel could easily have been edited down to about half its size and would have been much, much better for it.

[João Roque · Rating 1 out of 5]

O que é necessário para que abandone a leitura de um livro?
Por assim dizer, tudo!
Que o livro não me agrade, que o não compreenda, e sobretudo, considerando-me, modéstia à parte, suficientemente inteligente e culto, que ache esse livro como impossível de ler.
Assim sucede com esta minha (infeliz) estreia com o universo literário de António Lobo Antunes - "Que farei quando tudo arde" é intragável...
Felizmente tenho aqui para ler noutra altura mais dois livros do autor para tentar modificar a muito má impressão que este livro me deixou.

[Sandra C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eu sei que Lobo Antunes afirmou em diversas entrevistas que os seus livros inscrevem uma voz apenas, mas eu leio este como uma conversa interior, com uma multiplicidade de vozes/pensares que convidam a participar do diálogo, sob pena de nada perceber para quem pretenda adoptar o papel de mero observador.
Lobo Antunes leva-me sempre em viagens imersivas, onde as fronteiras entre quem sou e o que leio se esbatem sem loucura, ainda que com o seu espectro a sorrir-me.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging read, but mesmerizing! Grateful for the cast of characters in the front, which I referred to often. Hard to know who was talking/thinking/acting - a tangle of thoughts,conversations and descriptions. Kind of stream of consciousness - but not often sure whose conscious! Poetic in a way.

[Renee · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book killed me. The story was so-so interesting but the voice and presentation of the story was not something I didn't enjoy. After about 300 pages (i think there are 500) I quit. I didn't care about the carters or the story and felt enough was enough.

[Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

What can you do when a novel drowns you in voices of the damned? That's precisely what happens with this novel. As a reader, you are trapped in the world of voices, ostensibly the voice of the main narrator, Paulo, the son of a LIsbon drag queen father and an alcoholic prostitute mother who himself is a heroin addict, but there are other voices, too. Voices of confusion, anger, hate, damage, lies, regret, etc. They endlessly repeat. They all run together. There's no way out. But it somehow works, reaches a poetic level, cries out from deep despair. Fortunately, the answer has to come from the outside here because the narrative voices remain trapped in their own personal nightmares of poverty, loneliness, obsession and pain. This is not an easy narrative to get through or a pleasant one to ponder. And, while I'm not sure that I want to be trapped in Lisbon that Lobo Antunes creates here, I am curious where his other novels might lead.

[Didier Vanoverbeke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel of the downtrodden reads like a symphony, with many voices weaving in and out of a blurred narrative driven by a rhythmic prose style. I have seen many reviewers on this network maligning this style, though I would argue the individual chapters are short enough that the demands on your parsing faculties are not that daunting. And parse is what you wil do, as perspectives and narrators grab the reins without warning, especially in the last quarter of the novel, where the amount of perspectives can run up to about 4 per 'strand' (since there aren't that many traditional sentences in this one).
In the end, you're left with a compelling cast of characters who battle themselves, their demons, and those would take advantage of them. It is also reflects the brittle quality of memory, as protagonist Paulo tries to sift throgh ghostly shapes to reconstruct his heroin-soaked past.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed getting lost in this book. Information comes to you in a fractured, repetitive nature as if you're flicking back and forth between several channels of one's mind. The narrator is in constant flux as well. I was genuinely confused at first, but once I accepted my perpetually unmoored state, the text revealed new treasures. Not sure I can recommend this other than to anyone who appreciates non-traditional storytelling. Not sure if I find the final chapter endearing or a cop-out. Either way, it doesn't tarnish the book much.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually loved this book in theory, but could not really understand anything that was happening due to the stream of consciousness style writing. I ended up just absorbing what I could from turning the pages and enjoyed it, but it took a long time. The translation probably accounted for some of the confusion, but it’s also clear this is not meant to be read like a “normal” book.

[Wilte · Rating 1 out of 5]

Stream of consciousness-like writing without periods mingled with parts dialogue makes very tiring reading. Loads of characters (it is a big house) can't and don't generate interest. I quit after reading 20% of the book; saw no signs of improvement or hope.

[Stephany Joy]

A thistle of poetry that took my breath away at times but I ended up drowning in. A for effort, bookclub.

[Jesse K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, confusing, depressing, poetic, and amazing.

[David Swire]

Much more difficult than necessary. Over 600 pages to reach the ending I saw coming.

[André · Rating 3 out of 5]

Após a leitura deste livro, há a possibilidade do leitor necessitar de ajuda psicológica. É mais fácil encontrar uma agulha no palheiro do que um momento de felicidade neste livro.

[Alex Kalamaroff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has to be one of favorite book titles ever. --Alex Kalamaroff

[Beatrice]

Do I know how to read? This book makes me think no, no I do not. Will try again later.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cacaphonic.

Painful.

Wonderous.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I do when everything is on fire? Nothing but burn as bright as you can.

[Vera Pereira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um livro único, inesperado, complicado mas também que se quer saber onde vai. Longo e surpreendente.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The prose style and what it evokes is very well done but for almost 600 pages it felt tiring, especially since I felt the constant memories were little more than that. So towards the latter half of the novel I felt as if I was reading a writing exercise. Props to Rabassa though. He proves to be a fearless translator.

[Javier]

Es la primera vez que leo a António Lobo Antunes, y mucho me temo que la última; digamos que es mi torpeza literaria aderezada con un gusto literario menos cíclico, pero es que me ha sido sumamente complicado seguirle el ritmo a la historia, aún así, lo terminé.

El libro se fundamenta en el tema de la disolución de la identidad, narrado desde la perspectiva de el hijo de una travesti Drag Queen que hace performance en un club para varones; pero no es solo eso, también es la historia de una familia disuelta por la carencia, las drogas, el alcohol y Soraia, los personajes se disuelven junto con su vida, la de un hijo descubriendo la afición de su padre y una esposa señalada y avergonzada por lo mismo, y el trayecto a partir de la muerte de ella.