Anyway, all that is to explain why I haven’t been able to dedicate as much time to Three Percent as I would’ve liked. And why I haven’t been able to read as many new books as I would like. Which is why, rather than writing up long posts about all the new books I love, I’m going to start writing weekly posts about new and forthcoming and recently released books that I want to read.

I’m going to start today with five books from the Iberian Peninsula. This might seem a bit random, but I’ve always had a thing for Barcelona and for Antonio Lobo Antunes. Plus, this summer I was lucky enough to speak at the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and fell back in love with all things Iberian.

You might think I’m kidding, but when I got back, I bought a case of Spanish wines, bitched up all the chorizo dishes, and checked out all the Iberian-related books, such as The Basque History of the World, which I would be reading RIGHT NOW if I didn’t have two Open Letter books to proof, one to edit, and a Korean manuscript to evaluate. Ah, publishing!

Sticking with the Basque interest (they have their own breed of cows and pigs and sheep! they invented their own shoes! their language is loaded with ‘x’s and ‘k’s! and has no word for “Basque,” just for “Basque speakers”! so unique, so interesting!) the current book on my nightstand is which comes out in September from Graywolf Press. This is the third Axtaga book Graywolf has published (Obabakoak and The Accordionist’s Son being the others), and maybe the least Basque of the three—it’s set in the Congo—but it’s new, and is about corruption and things evil, which makes for good beginning-of-the-school-year reading.

Sticking with the corruption theme, the other book that arrived recently that caught my eye is Peter Bush’s new translation of which originally was published in Spanish in the 1920s. According to the NYRB press materials, this was “the first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and the avowed inspiration for Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme.” That’s some pretty fine company to be keeping, and with Peter Bush’s involvement, I’m totally sold. It’s also interesting that Valle-Inclan—who was born in Galicia—wrote a book about a revolution in Mexico.

Switching gears from writers writing about places other than their homeland, Jose Saramago—whose posthumous output is approaching L. Ron Hubbard levels—has a new book out: a novel set in a southern province of Portugal and featuring the Mau Tempo family, a family that resembles Saramago’s own grandparents. I’ve never been a huge Saramago fan, although I do enjoy reading his books for entertainment (along with those of Joyce Carol Oates, which sounds like a slight to both authors, but truly isn’t), but I’m really excited to read this, since it came out in 1980, long before the Nobel Prize and hopefully before he started relying on the sort of smug narratorial tone that infests his more recent works.

As a sidenote, the Saramago is the second book on my Iberian love-list that’s translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Not-so-coincidentally, I just finished reading The City and the Mountains by Portuguese author Eca de Queiros, which was ALSO translated by Costa. This was the first Queiros book I’ve read in full, and although it’s not perfect, it’s really interesting and has led to my adding a ton of his titles to me “to read bookshelves,” including “The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes,” which is available from Tagus Press in Gregory Rabassa’s translation. This bit of the jacket copy is exactly why this is the next Quieros book I’ll be picking up:

The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes—ostensibly letters, with an arch introduction—actually ranges widely and revels in many forms of discourse. In this singular work, originally published in 1900, one finds meditations, dialogues, observations, grand shifts in tone, occulted ironies, pastiches, lampoons, and and underlying hilarity throughout.

Another linguistic reveler of sorts—and a fellow Portugese writer—is Goncalo M. Tavares, who is best well know for his two series: series, one bit of which will be coming out from Texas Tech later this year; and “The Kingdom” series, which consists of four volumes published by Dalkey Archive—Jerusalem, Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique, and Joseph Walser’s Machine. I read the first two right before meeting up with him in Lisbon, and really, really loved Jerusalem. (Learning to Pray is great, but not quite as great as Jerusalem.) In Lisbon, organizers Jeff Parker and Scott Laughlin were both high on the most recent book in “The Kingdom” to be released. I’m a whore for trilogies and series, especially series of this sort, which don’t follow in a linear fashion, but interlock in a more interesting, complicated fashion. Something like Kjaerstad’s which is built from three different narrators with three different takes on Jonas Wergeland’s life, and structured in three very different ways. Or the Joyce Cary trilogy that NYRB reissued a way back. Anyway, Tavares’s “Kingdom” is more like that than like a sort of space opera trilogy featuring all the same characters. Sure, some character reappear in Tavares’s different books, but the connections between the books are more thematic and tonal than anything else. But I’ll write more about this after reading Joseph Walser’s Machine and the final book in the series.

That’s it for this week . . . Next week I’ll write about a book I want to read to be able to not understand it. This will make sense . . . Promise . . .

What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa. (Portugal, W. W. Norton)

For years, Antonio Lobo Antunes has been one of my personal favorite authors, and Act of the Damned one of my all-time favorite books. So I was really excited when his most recent title — — made our Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist.

It’s also fantastic that Antunes won the and honored at a ceremony that took place a couple weeks ago at the Guadalajara Book Fair.

Rather than describe this really inventive, hallucinatory, mesmerizing book myself (everyone should read this—it’s one of those books that teaches you how to grasp it as you read. And the way the incomplete sentences/thoughts/memories weave together is very musical and complicated in a gorgeously artistic way, despite the fact that a great amount of pain and suffering is at the heart of this novel), I thought it would be more interesting to published the introduction that Robert Weil of W. W. Norton—Antunes’s current English-language editor—gave at the recent Juan Rulfo ceremony:

It is tremendous honor to give this introduction on behalf of Antonio Lobo Antunes, whom I publish in the United States. Hailed as one of our greatest living writers, regarded by a burgeoning number of exuberant critics as the most brilliant novelist of his generation in Europe today, Antonio Lobo Antunes, has given us an astonishing body of work, well over 20 novels and memoirs. Prizes and literary accolades surely are impressive enough, but Lobo Antunes has more: that rarest of gifts – a genius to make us understand what it feels like to be human, to render both love and sorrow on the printed page. He is a man whose stories somehow enable us to transcend our own everyday existence, a man whose own search for compassion awakens the compassion that sleeps within all of us.

How do I describe Antonio Lobo Antunes’s writing? For those of you who have already had the thrill of reading him, you’ll know that his language will mesmerize, if not overwhelm your sensory system with an almost hallucinatory power. If literature were music, Antonio would be a composer of swirling symphonies, or intensely deep operas, with themes plucked from Verdi’s tragedies and soaring cadences resembling Wagner’s Gotterdammerung. For those of you who have not yet had the privilege of reading him, his books, suffused with the raw truth of everyday life, and often tinged with an inescapable feeling of sadness or loss, ring with a voice, a music that is his alone. His pages, you’ll discover, boil with seductive rhythms. His dazzling literary tropes and leit motifs define the very essence of this Portuguese master. Trust me, when you take the plunge, his language, will forever emblazon itself into your memory.

It is then not surprising that Lobo Antunes, born in Lisbon under Salazar’s dictatorship in September of 1942, yearned as a boy to be a poet. His novels, as much as they are stories, are also strings of poetic words, indescribably beautiful, that transcend the conventional forms of modern fiction. Each is, in fact, a rare necklace worth beholding. In reading his novels, be it early ones like Memoria de elefante or Os Cus de Judas, or a more recent one like Que farei quando tudo arde?, we discover breathtaking phrases and somersaulting paragraphs that prove Lobo Antunes has a sorcerer’s ability to bend and twist the rules of time: he can retrieve the universal memories of a childhood lost; compress time or make it stand still; exhume the murky past and graft it seamlessly onto the present as if it had never gone away. He replicates the wild and unpredictable patterns of human consciousness right there on the page, not the way, say, a Victorian novelist like Henry James might want to harness the unruliness of life in a lady’s corset. No, Lobo Antunes presents life just as the brain really perceives things: memory and imagination, cognition and literature, suddenly collide and merge into one.

Lobo Antunes is receiving this esteemed prize in Mexico. How appropriate, given the many similarities between him and that greatest of Mexican writers, Juan Rulfo. Fourteen years ago, in an essay that she wrote about Rulfo’s great classic Pedro Paramo, the American critic Susan Sontag described a surrealistic narrative that “switches back and forth between first person and third person, present and past,” in which Rulfo effortlessly juxtaposed a haunted world of the living with that of the dead, so that the two towns of Comala, present and past, crash together in the same surreal time. In many ways, though, Sontag could have been writing about Lobo Antunes, himself so skilled a juggler of disparate voices – poor and rich, young and old, benevolent or despotic – that he would have made Rulfo smile. To me it seems clear that Lobo Antunes’s lyrical narratives, stories imbued with his own love of peasants, pensioners, widows and gigolos, simple people all, often pay homage to Rulfo’s own literary style and pyrotechnic forms. As recently as just three weeks ago, I was delighted to see a review of a Lobo Antunes novel that compared him to Rulfo. Reviewing What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? in the Washington Post, Jaime Manrique observed that this novel, newly translated by Gregory Rabassa, “brings to mind the late Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, which also centers on the search of a son for his dead father. Here too,” Manrique noted, “the dead address us from the underworld.” The similarities to Rulfo do not merely end with form: like Rulfo, who studied law but ending up selling tires for many years to support his family, Lobo Antunes did not gleefully start writing as a young man. Forced by his concerned father to go to medical school, Lobo Antunes chose the specialty of psychiatry, but was summarily drafted and, in 1970, sent as a young man to Portugal’s last colonial war in Angola. There he communed with the young African women whose squalling babies he had to deliver, addicted himself to man’s inexhaustible litany of human suffering, and observed the obscenities of war so totally that these barbaric images permanently seared his mind and invaded what would become his life’s fiction. Like Juan Rulfo, literary recognition then came late, for after returning shell-shocked from Angola, Lobo Antunes worked in Lisbon’s teeming public hospitals, where the “nurses glided like swans” and where “the silence of rubber, the gleam of metal, [the] people speaking in hushed tones as if in church, the sad solidarity of waiting rooms, the interminable corridors, [and] the terrifyingly solemn ritual[s]” of life and death all fascinated him. Futilely struggling throughout the 1970s with multiple drafts of a novel that never came to pass, suddenly “some kind of fetus turned a somersault inside [his] belly,” and in 1979, Lobo Antunes finally published his first two novels. He was already 37.

Yet the destiny to be a writer was always there. The oldest child of two oldest children, robbed of his innocence by the quick-fire procession of no less than five younger brothers, Antonio recalled that “as soon as one of my brothers was transferred to the bedroom, another howling baby would take his place in the cradle.” Yearning, of all things, to be a poet, young Antonio was ineluctably drawn to the oddities of existence, fascinated by impulses that would hardly interest other young boys. “At seven years old, “he recalls “I was dying of love for the gypsy girls at the Saturday markets who helped their families sell mules whose sores they disguised with black paint. I remember dark eyes, sometimes surprisingly fair hair, bare feet, dealers in gold jewelry on bicycles . . . [who] at night . . . would come in dreams to trouble me, cawing like crows and saying nothing.” While his father played tennis and his grandfather relaxed with a newspaper at the family’s summer villa, nestled in a pleasant fold of hills, little Antonio “saw the open coffin of a child pass by, a little white coffin,” and listened in the distance for the church bells tolling for the dead.

One after another, these boyhood observations amassed — first a gentle breeze that takes on force . . . that becomes a gale, then a tropical storm, and finally a hurricane of such power and velocity that its path cannot be altered. As Antonio has written in hindsight, “I will never forget the beginning of my literary career. It was sudden, instantaneous, fulminating. I was traveling on the street car to Benfica…when a surprising certainty blinded me: I’m going to be a writer. I was twelve years old,” he recalls, “preparing for a brilliant career as an ice-hockey player, and unsure whether to be Spider-Man or Flash Gordon, but inclining slightly more toward Spider-Man because he could climb buildings, and in the midst of this came the call, the vocation, the certainty of a fate entirely unconnected with my plans, my dreams, my fantasies about muscles and fights. . . . The following day I unleashed a few sonnets. They must have been pretty awful because, when I showed them to my mother, she gave me the pained look one bestows on cripples and hopeless idiots.”

Yet his mother’s reservations could not dissuade him. He recalls one year later, at thirteen, then at fourteen and fifteen, “I used to read any book I could lay my hands on, my parents’ books, the books I stole and the book I could buy, [and] for some reason I always came back, just as the tongue tirelessly searches for a missing tooth, to these lines from a French poem I had copies into a notebook: Beyond grief, an open window a lighted window. Beyond grief, an open window a lighted window.

Fifty-four years after he received that first calling, that mysterious intimation that he had to be a writer, we are all, whether here this morning in Guadalajara, or in the two dozen countries where he is translated, invited to pass through Lobo Antunes’s “open window.” And fifty-four years after he seized his parents’ and grandparents’ books, he’s still at it, a literary kleptomaniac. Only two months ago, in my office in New York, he stared with those wide, goo-goo eyes at the books on my bookshelf, and then stuffed a huge suitcase, which he and his wife, Maria, had lugged to New York, with dozens of heavy American volumes. They proceeded – and I don’t want to know how –to lug them to Boston, Washington, and then back to New York, before returning (I can only imagine the overweight charges!) on the night flight back to Lisbon. Since Antonio’s brief American visit, I have felt bereft. You see, in a very short time, Antonio has become not only a dear friend but also a soul mate. I yearn, as his American editor, to embrace more of his novels, for I want to hear the melodies, the delusional songs, the piercing meditations on the vagaries and permutations of the human condition. Unashamedly, I admit that I wish to read more of his stories, stories of madness and consumption, of growing old, and, yes, of loving no matter what. I want to thank the organizers of the Guadalajara Fair for inviting me and asking me to say these words. It is indeed a great honor to introduce Antonio Lobo Antunes . . . my friend . . . and, a writer of the very first rank.