Lobo-Antunes

‘I don’t write the books, it’s my own hand working independently’

“A revolutionary in Portuguese literature
A psychiatrist never considering being anything else than a writer
A writer marked by the colonial war in Angola
A colonial war that brought ‘ghosts’ and ‘death’ to his work
It wasn’t Lobo Antunes who lost the Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize lost him
Writing as a ‘virus’ and a generation that is ‘passing away’
His exhilarating novels forced Portugal to confront its darkest moments.”

António Lobo Antunes – one of the most important voices in modern Portuguese literature who died on the 5th of March at the age of 83 – published 41 books, 32 of which are novels. His books often resist straightforward plot, instead unfolding through overlapping monologues in which multiple voices circle the same events from different angles.

He was the second Portuguese writer – after Fernando Pessoa – to be included in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and several times nominated for the Nobel Prize, which he never received.

His exacting modernistic style provoked a lifelong controversy between him and that other icon of the Portuguese literature – José Saramago – who did win the Nobel Prize in 1998.
However, many in Portugal felt the honour had gone to the wrong writer.

He was trained as a psychiatrist, worked in the Miguel Bombarda hospital in Lisbon and wrote in the evenings. From 1971 to 1973 he served as an army doctor in Angola. His experience during Portugal’s brutal colonial war marked him profoundly and the war’s moral disorientation and emotional wreckage would haunt much of his fiction.

His first novels – Elephant’s Memory and South of Nowhere – both published in 1979 – drew on his experiences as a young doctor navigating the political and personal upheavals of post-revolutionary Portugal, and brought him instant acclaim.

In South of Nowhere (Os Cus de Judas), a veteran addresses his blood-soaked memories to a silent woman in a Lisbon bar, but in fact directed at a Portugal that has all but forgotten its war crimes.

But it was his magnum opus Fado Alexandrino (1983) – capturing the generation’s disillusionment with the colonial war – that confirmed his status as a major literary voice. In novels such as The Inquisitor’s Manuel (1996) and The Splendour of Portugal (1997), he explored the lingering shadows of colonialism, the hypocrisy of the Portuguese elite and the dysfunction of family life.

Act of the Damned (1985) is set in the aftermath of the 1974 Carnation Revolution that saw the end of dictator Salazar’s Estado Novo regime. The book inhabits the minds of a landed aristocratic family as they congregate at the deathbed of its patriarch, keen on their inheritance. Meanwhile, communists are baying for blood, and the family must flee.

Through widely acclaimed internationally and translated into many languages. Lobo Antunes remained relatively little known in the English-speaking world. He is survived by his third wife, his three daughters and his three brothers

Enjoy your week         Aproveite a semana             (pic Publico/Sapo)





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Coffee

qahwa -kaffa – kahve –capha- cafeh – caffé – café – koffie – coffy – coffee

The origin of the word coffee is probably derived from Kaffa, the name of an Ethiopian kingdom in the 15th century. At that time in Yemen a beverage was prepared from a plant of Ethiopian origin, which proved to be useful to keep the Sufi mystics awake for praying at night. The word used for the beverage was qahwah, and considering that the plant came from Kaffa, it is not unreasonable to think that there would be a relationship.

Etymologists, however, are inclined to consider the word being a derivation from a word that meant ‘wine’ in Arabic. A non-alcoholic wine; the perfect solution for Muslims who needed a stimulant but were not allowed to drink alcohol.
Coffee sales were centred in the Yemeni city of Moca and spread from there throughout the Arabian Peninsula.

In the 16th century, the governor of Yemen, Ozdemir Pasha, took the coffee to the court of Suleiman the Magnificent, and from then on coffee became popular in Istanbul, and thereafter in the entire Ottoman Empire, under the Turkish Ottoman name kahve.
Cafés were booming in the capital, and the sultan introduced coffee masters in his court. Anyone who wanted to be someone in the Empire had to have at least someone who knew how to prepare good coffee; nowadays called baristas!

From Istanbul, it wasn’t difficult for the beverage to reach Venice, one of the biggest trade centres in the world. There might have been those who thought it a little suspicious for Christians to drink a Muslim beverage but when beverage coming from the depths of Arabia delighted the palate of the Pope, no Christian hesitated to have a coffee, which the Italians called caffè.

The popularity of coffee thereafter spread across the capitals of Europe, and finally arrived in Paris, where it ended up being one of the central elements of the city’s identity under the French name café, the same name also used for the beverage in Portugal, where the first coffee roasters appeared in Lisbon in the 17th century.

But there was – besides the southern route across land via Istanbul – a second northern route through which the habit of drinking coffee spread throughout the continent, in a similar way as tea was introduced in Europe. And once again, Dutch ships were involved, which transported the product directly from Yemen to the UK.

In 1652, the first English coffeeshop was opened in Oxford and soon after coffee shops expanded as popular meeting points in London. Unlike the word café – which came via the South – the word coffee comes from the Dutch word koffie.

The word espresso comes from the machine that, from the mid-20th century onwards, was used to create espresso coffee. Previously, the beverage was prepared in the Turkish way, mixing the ground beans with boiled water. Now, with the machine, the coffee is prepared with hot water passing under pressure over the ground beans and running through a small spout (called bica) into the cup.

In Portugal, the usual word to ask for an espresso is the word café (or bica).
So, whoever asks for café – just like that – is asking for an espresso.

Enjoy the week                                                 Approveite a semana




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