Description
A political historian named Rui S. begins to unravel as his carefully arranged life collides with the inevitabilities he can’t control—illness, estrangement, and the collapse of relationships that once seemed permanent. When he tries to rewrite his future through a half-formed plan for escape and reinvention, events spiral in surreal, dreamlike turns that force him back toward the one thread of meaning he still possesses: a childhood memory of walking with his father and listening to him “explain” the birds. Blending remembrance with disorientation, the novel becomes both a mournful reckoning with lost ideals and a circus-bright meditation on love, ideology, and self-deception. With António Lobo Antunes’s signature lyrical intensity and shifting, hallucinatory perspective, this is a dazzling study of how people search for coherence when the past refuses to stay quiet.
Available Editions
paperback
Grove Press
Published Aug 7, 1995
261 pages
ISBN: 9780802134202
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Details
First Published
1995
Language
eng
Translation
From: por
Content Warnings
Content and trigger warnings for An Explanation of the Birds by António Lobo Antunes.