Para aquela que está sentada no escuro à minha espera
Rights sold:
  • Dutch Ambo/Anthos Uitgevers
  • French Bourgois
  • German Luchterhand-Verlagsgruppe Random House
  • Spanish Penguin Random House

 

 

Para aquela que está sentada no escuro à minha espera / For the Girl Sitting in the Dark Waiting for Me

Novel , 2016

Dom Quixote

Pages: 352

"What’s in this book is not a story, but a voice rising up between two silences." Bruno Vieira Amaral, Observador

At the end of her life, a retired actress finds herself afflicted with an irreversible disease that affects her memory. It becomes increasingly difficult for her to not only remember specific episodes in her life, but also her own name. Having faked the voices of so many characters, she barely recognises herself, and past and present become confused in her memory. The boundary inside her that separates her voice from other voices becomes diffuse, and her identity is diluted.

Immersed in the actress’s mind, the narrative discourse offers the reader brief, fragmented access to the life and personality of the woman who lived inside the actress, who is being gradually but implacably devastated by disease. At the end of the day, that’s also what literature is: a game of voices searching for identity.

"This intense novel raises the question when Lobo Antunes will finally receive the Nobel Prize." Trouw (The Netherlands)

"Lobo Antunes leaves the reader breathless from beginning to end." NRC Handelsblad (The Netherlands) 

"L'écrivain portugais a renoncé a parler comme un livre, mais il n'est pas question pour lui d'écrire comme on parle. Il invente un parler qui ramasse en lui tout le savoir-faire de l'écriture et le fait oublier." Hédi Kaddour, Le Monde

"Car Lobo Antunes est un auteur lyrique, nostalgique, noir et dróle, - comme Proust, dont le rapproche sa phrase sinueuse, intemtlnable, musicale ; cómme Céline, dont il partage le goût de l'Hénaurme, la propension a passer sans solution de continuité du réel au délire, tout en restant dans le réel." Christophe Mercier

"Ce livre terrible, superbe, nous révele que meme dans l'obscurité de la déchéance d 'un esprit, subsistent des moments radieux, volés a l'enfance. Lobo Antunes va une nouvelle fois la ou si peu oseraient s'avancer, sur la face noire de l'esprit humain." Oriane Jeancourt Galiniani, Transfuge