António Lobo Antunes - Midnight Is Not For Everyone (Dalkey Archive Press, 2025) ***½

António Lobo Antunes is one of Portugal's most celebrated authors, and this book is his masterpiece, now available in English. I am really in two minds about the novel. It is well-written and very creative in its approach, but it's far too long for the writing style he has adopted. I am used to read difficult or very long books (thinkg of "Gravity's Rainbow", or "2666"), but here I dropped out after more than 200 pages, with almost another 400 still to read. 

The book describes the last three days of a young woman, who reflects, and who reconstructs the events leading up to these days in the past decades of her life, not by actually describing the events, but by indirectly recreating them in an endless stream of consciousness of her own thoughts (now or some other time) and the verbatim comments of other characters, mostly without reference about who is actually speaking. The effect of this style is quite desorienting and requires a lot of attention of the reader. 

"- It's a pinky, what a relief

inattentive to the pines, from afar walking down to the kiosk where Senhor Manelinho, all flattery and friendship 

-Take a look at this flower of a man

forget-me-nots, snapdragons, birds of paradise, at school with an atlas with all of that in pictures, the names in Portuguese and Latin below them, the Biology teacher 

-An endless collection

Senhor Manelinho' s wife pointing out my father to a customer browsing magazines

-He was a perfect man

now deformed and red, with difficulty speaking, sentences that took time to unravel, he liberated his tongue a little in the cafe with the foosball table, thanks to the drink 

-I feel better already

ready to go far if his liver gave him permission but it didn't, 

the rascal, the body turns against us if we trust it, Senhor Manelinho, whose heart was betraying him 

-You have to train them like the animals

and even training it like the animals, which was his case, God knows, Senhor Manelinho stabbing his chest

-I have two plastic veins

not in bed eighteen, in a nursing home in Coimbra, looking at lines on a display

-I spent twelve days after the operation looking at that movie and stitches in his thorax patching up disasters, lunches through a straw, dinners through a straw, an Indian squeezing his sides forcing him to cough 

-Cough up the mucous from your lungs, partner

and my father going up the street with us holding on to the sides of the buildings" (p. 255)

Other authors have used the same technique - such as Mario Vargas Llosa in "Conversation in the Cathedral" - but never in such an obscure and hard to grasp way. The whole world become almost intangible and abstract, despite the very concrete action. The world is a little beyond understanding, and can only be reached by adding layers of memories, fragments of sentences and quick observations followed by emotional responses. Nothing happens, or nothing definite happens. In this respect, the reading experience is quite exceptional, but it requires true courage to read it till the end. It's great, but too long. Or maybe that is also a point he wants to make. You just don't know.