By the Rivers of Babylon
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Antonio Lobo Antunes; Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
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Format: HardcoverPrice: $26.00
A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal’s most celebrated writers
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.
António Lobo Antunes, born in Lisbon and trained as a psychiatrist, is the author of more than thirty books. He lives in Portugal. Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over thirty years. She lives in Leicester, UK.
“One of the living writers who will matter most.”—Harold Bloom
“A novelist of the very first rank.”—George Steiner
“A master navigator of the human psyche.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Perhaps Portugal’s greatest living author . . . a genius.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“One of the most skillful psychological portraitists writing anywhere.”—New Yorker
Publication Date: April 25, 2023
