Surely some have asked him how things are with his announcement that he no longer wants to write a novel.

The news appeared in Lisbon's Diário de Notícias, then it was here, and it quoted Portuguese writer and doctor António Lobo Antunes as saying that he only wanted to prepare the publication of one last book.

"After that the novels stop, the newspaper articles, everything, and I don't publish anymore.

My voice, whether spoken or written, will no longer be heard.”

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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Luckily nothing came of it.

Lobo Antunes' voice is still loud and powerful.

Today he is the only Portuguese man of letters of world renown and – after Fernando Pessoa – the second to be honored with an edition of the French classics series “Pléiade”.

He is held in higher esteem abroad than at home;

one does not want to read in Portugal incessantly about the trauma of the Angola war, the moral disaster of colonialism, the depravity of the Portuguese middle class and a gallery of depressed figures who trudge through life without love but with terrible memories.

It may have been at the time when the author wanted to stop writing the novel "What horses are those that cast their shadows into the sea?".

The book with the gorgeous title – all its titles are beautiful – was published in Lisbon in 2009 and also in German in 2013.

There are usually three or four years between the publication of the original and the translation by Maralde Meyer-Minnemann, a master of her craft, on whose advice even the stubborn Lobo Antunes gives something.

But to get rid of the idea of ​​"quitting" once and for all, it should be mentioned that the author has published at least seven other books since 2009, most recently the novel "The Last Door Before Night".

Dialogues like lights in the night

Taking the vast body of work that Portugal's most prolific writer has built in more than forty years, two related elements can be discerned: the reign of the unleashed voice and the incessant addressing against death.

Lobo Antunes' novel aesthetic follows an associative montage technique, in which large and small, important and banal drift through consciousness in a broad stream.

After a few early novels, the author had found the typographical form that was appropriate for him: dialogues do not alternate with descriptive passages, but only break into the thought prose briefly, mostly in one line, like lights flickering in the night.

The effect is that of a far away outside world,

It's mostly hells that Lobo Antunes tells about: stories of lonely, alienated people who have to talk to make some sense of it and reassure themselves that they are here.

He himself was probably one of them when, at the age of 28, he went to Angola as a military doctor and from there, over the course of two years, he sent first incredulous, then increasingly bitter letters to his wife in Portugal.

In Angola he saw the senselessness of the colonial war without suspecting that he was experiencing the primal trauma of the future writer.

According to the Munzinger archive, which in turn cites a source called Fama, Lobo Antunes writes eighteen hours a day.

That's unlikely.

But it's true that he writes a great deal, preferably with a pen.

And that he needs a break of a few months after each of his long novels.

Furthermore, that he is proud of his books, still smokes, doesn't hear well, doesn't need literary criticism, considers himself apolitical and is a fan of Benfica.

His grandmother was German, hence – he says – the sense of order in his work.

Anyone who doesn't want to go straight to the symphonies of his novels should read the three volumes of his columns ("Chronicles"), which Lobo Antunes wrote almost thirty years ago for a Sunday magazine.

In one of them he calls himself a "shepherd dog of a flock of words."

But: “You can't bark at the words: you have to circle them.” Elsewhere: “He had never decided to make books: something or someone had imposed it on him, and he thanked God that those he cared for , were free men and treated him with that indulgence that one gives to someone who has lost an arm in the service of something senseless.” Today, António Lobo Antunes celebrates his eightieth birthday.