IHT.com – By Will Blythe
What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? By António Lobo Antunes. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. 585 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $19.95; £14.10.
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.