"One of these days I'll beach right here, devoured by fish like a dead
whale," muses Rui S., portly thirty-three-year-old political historian
and hero of the latest dazzling novel by Ant"nio Lobo Antunes. Little do
we or Rui S. realize how prophetic his whiny lamentation proves to be
until the close of this beautifully realized masterpiece of remembrance.
Unable to accept the facts of his life"his mother's imminent death by
cancer; his estrangement from his bourgeois family, especially his
industrialist father; and his blunt rejection by his first wife and two
children"Rui S. decides to change things.
Now married to the nagging, dogmatic Communist Marilia, Rui S. puts
together a weak-kneed agenda for change: he decides to skip yet another
dull and pompous academic conference, escape to a resort town north of
Lisbon, and there dump his homely wife. Marilia, however, beats him to
the punch, announcing that she wants out of the marriage before he can
summon the courage to speak. Returning again and again to the only
memory he has of being loved"walking with his father as a young boy and
listening to him explain the behavior of birds'Rui S. tries in vain to
make sense of himself.
In An Explanation of the Birds, Lobo Antunes has once again proved
himself a master of the surreal, creating both a circus-like dream and a
mournful eulogy for the lost ideals of post-revolutionary Lisbon.
