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