Well, it was a battle, but I did finish it. Antunes's novel is more like a very long stream-of-consciousness prose poem, where the present, past, and maybe the future are all mixed together. Snippets of conversation mingle with in the innermost thoughts of a variety of characters, along with what I guess would describe as kind of mini-vignettes. Probably the most difficult book I've ever read (I tend to like at least fairly realistic fiction or fantasty-ish lit along the lines of Calvino and Borges), but the often beautiful prose made it worth it in the end, even if much of time it was hard to know exactly what was going on. Ok, maybe that's not the best endorsement, but it really is like being inside someone's memory, I think that's the best way to put it. ( )

This is a very dicult book to understand, very much like james joyce, the story of a young boy, then a young man remembering growing up is images. there is no cohert story, only images ( )

Reviewers (including one in the NYT Sunday book review) compare Antunes to Faulkner and other modernists, because the action takes places at all times simultaneously; his characters say things they've said long before, or won't actually say for a long time to come, because Antunes is conjuring a young man's feverishly intense imagination, which echoes and re-echoes with things he's experienced and with the campy cast of characters he grew up with.

But all that is not really relevant. It would be possible to read this for insight into the world of drag queens in Portugal, and it is impossible not to read it as a late modernist experiment, flawed by its familiarity but redeemed by its funny energy and glamorous despair. I don't think it is really about either of those things. It is about the author's inability to create the kind of incantatory theatricality that is, to him, a sensitive and even profound representation of his imaginative world. I was only convinced by the echoing voices on one or two pages. The rest seemed far too loosely composed. He hopes that collages create expressive effects, but they seldom do. The real difference between Faulkner and Antunes is that Faulkner's novels are tight, tight, tight, and Antunes's are loose, loose, loose. The book flaps and flutters and does not persuade. Bad craftsmanship. ( )

This book is a cross between a Jose Saramago novel and a Pedro Almodovar film. So you if you like both of them, you might like this book. It was rather dense, so I am very proud of myself for finishing it, especially since I kept falling asleep while reading it. ( )

Superb way of putting the thoughts of the main characters into language. The memories of different persons are interwoven into a beautifull sheet of poetic prose which shines a beautifull light on the horrors of the past. ( )