Portuguese Literature Series

Set in the aftermath of the “Carnation Revolution” of April 25, 1974, Antonio Lobo Antunes’s Warning to the Crocodiles is a fragmented narrative of the violent tensions resulting from major political changes in Portugal.

Told through the memories of four women who spend their days fashioning homemade explosives and participating in the kidnap and torture of communists, the novel details the clandestine activities of an extreme right-wing Salazarist faction resisting the country’s new embrace of democracy.

Warning to the Crocodiles (Exortação aos Crocodilos) has won:
- Best Novel by the Portuguese Writers Association (Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela da Associação Portuguesa de Escritores) (1999)
- The D. Dinis Prize of the Casa de Mateus Foundation (Prémio D. Dinis da Fundação Casa de Mateus) (1999)
- The Austrian State Literature Prize (Prémio de Literatura Europeia do Estado Austríaco) (2000)

Knowledge of Hell

by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Published 17 April 2008

Like his creator, the narrator of this novel is a psychiatrist who loathes psychiatry, a veteran of the despised 1970s colonial war waged by Portugal against Angola, a survivor of a failed marriage, and a man seeking meaning in an uncaring and venal society. The reader joins that narrator on a journey, both real and phantasmagorical, from his Algarve vacation back to Lisbon and the mental-hospital job he hates. In the course of one long day and evening, he carries on an imaginary conversation with his daughter Joanna, observes with surreal vision the bleak countryside of his nation, recalls the horrors of his involuntary role in the suppression of Angolan independence, and curses the charlatanism of contemporary psychiatric “advances” that destroy rather than heal.