Instructions to the crocodiles
Instructions to the Crocodiles is a novel by António Lobo Antunes . It was published in 1999 in the Portuguese original edition as Exortação aos Crocodilos by Publicacoes Dom Quixote , Lisbon, and in the same year in German in the translation by Maralde Meyer-Minnemann by Luchterhand Literaturverlag Munich. It is Lobo Antune's fourteenth novel.
Classification in the overall work
In addition to the 1997 “ Handbook of the Inquisitors ”, the “Instructions to the Crocodiles” is another novel about power, loss of power and the effects of the Carnation Revolution on political opponents. The structure is similar to the 1983 novel "Fado Alexandrino", the most successful to date. Only in it there are four male actors who give their views of the time in the wars of independence in Angola, the fascist Salazar regime in Portugal and after the Carnation Revolution in monologues.
Structure and content
Four women tell of their lives as spouses, fiancee, widow and god-niece with terrorists who are planning a coup in Portugal after the Carnation Revolution in 1974. With Mimi's memory of childhood and a promising promise from grandmother Mama Alicia to get rich with the recipe for Coca-Cola, the 32-chapter novel begins and continues regularly, in which 3 other women take turns speaking without responsibility or guilt for their husbands to take upon themselves. Mimi has been hard of hearing since she was a child and lives with her husband in the villa where the participants of a conspiratorial right-wing extremist group "the crocodiles" go in and out. Her husband's hearing loss is used to excuse her presence at dodgy meetings. Mimi is silent about her husband's adultery and smilingly serves the tea to accompany the murder plans. This silence and the escape into domesticity is Mimi's leitmotif that is designed for her in the novel. The events go back to the time around 1974 after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, after which, supported by the Franco regime in Spain, coup attempts take place. Fatima's story in the second chapter reveals that she is divorced and that she is now staying with her godfather, but without wanting the caresses and kisses of this man who is absurdly a bishop. Fatima is shy of the sun and considers herself inedible. She neither wants to endure the infantile love of her ex-husband, who is still courting, nor reciprocate the fiddling of her godfather. In addition, an assassination attempt by car bomb on a communist priest is planned and carried out, which the bishop justifies with a repeated formula: "It is holy war". Fatima later has her ex-husband killed by the bishop's henchmen. The light-shy motif apparently releases them from giving testimony.
Celina has her say in chapter three and describes her mother's cheating from the perspective of a little girl. Celina then becomes Mimi's concubine and rival herself and worries about aging and her beauty, the fear of wrinkles, the fight against her own decline is greater than death until the end, to which she admits in Chapter 31: [ if there is still life after this night and I don't care if it will still exist, I am beautiful ...]. Simone's childhood memory turns into a dream from which she wakes up in the garage of her fiancé's boss and is supposed to go into hiding in Spain. Her fiancé is the chauffeur and car bomber. Her dream is to use the money for various assassination bombs to open a café and thus escape poverty. Self-loathing and missed opportunities are the leitmotifs for Simone.
This quartet corresponds to an archetypal role-play of citizens, monks, fighters and beggars. Although Lobo Antunes is most likely to identify with the role of Mimi and her orange clown wig, he has been hard of hearing himself since returning from the Angola War. As strict as this construction of the novel may appear, the interplay of the characters on several time levels, the alternation of character speech, surreal dream sequence and political present-day events, is openly amorphous. Antune's female figures are particularly suitable for looking inward, because they lack any generative attitude and wise foresight.
The novel dissolves into seemingly surreal plots. The villa where the crocodiles meet is blown up. Mimi explains already deceased after the explosion in the 29th chapter [... and above the peace of the bells a soldier in uniform or a man with cardboard glasses and a carnival nose, who bent down to us (Celina and Mimi) and assured us that I had died was. ...] Fatima has the last word in Chapter 30: [... I can die wonderfully, don't move, and everything would be very serious ... I would die a little just for the sake of pleasure. …] The votes of the women are thus retained after their death. Simone has a say in the final chapter in the form of a letter to her hated school friend Gisela and describes her view of the lost dream of her own café and as an act of revenge for the lack of interest and humiliation, with the prospect that she, Gisela, will not notice the bomb because the letter is only in the box when the house is reduced to rubble and ashes. Thus, the perpetrator and victim positions flow once again into Simone's final letter. After all, there is no crime that everyone does not commit under certain circumstances, constraints and preconditions.
interpretation
In Antune's novel there are no heroes or anti-heroes, only actors who, from their unenlightened point of view, namely those of four women, describe political action but are entangled in their own suffering and for strangely grotesque reasons (domesticity, family, love) are bound to the perpetrators that they cannot break away. The lack of responsibility or complicity is the reason why a literary identification of the reader with the heroines is hardly possible. In addition, the actors are not characterized much; instead, their monological perception is traced all the more precisely. The inner worlds, the loss of reality, the neuroses of the four women replace the classic techniques of storytelling. The cause and effect is replaced by a leitmotif and an association.
linguistic style
kaleidoscopic versus formulaic
Lobo Antunes joins passage after passage, which consist of dream sequences, mementos and childhood episodes. This is followed by a short, concise verbatim speech in the present tense or even as an imperative, which brings the reader back to the present. The verbatim speech interspersed with it gets something formulaic from the partial repetition: [... I want Fatima back, Herr Bishop ...], the divorced man repeats, interrupted by observations, flashbacks and subplots. As a result, the story takes place on several levels. As an image for the ups and downs of the four women's voices, Portugal's great river, the Tagus, often appears as a metaphor stream in the descriptions. [... towards the Tejo the evening begins, the cards of the pensioners dissolve in the twilight, and only the hats last on the indolence of the swans, when it got dark in my parents' house, the Merces church suffocated us with it Weight of her stones, she also stifled my mother's restlessness and my father's anger in the living room. ...]
microscopic descriptions
Lobo Antune's greatest talent lies in depicting situations in a characterizing way using tiny details. In Chapter 13 [... straight to the bottle in the sideboard, my hand trembling on the cork, half of the glass spread across the shirt front, I thought he was crying, but he wasn't crying, just pouring himself with the jerky gestures a wind-up doll more wine ...]; [... luckily he hadn't noticed the bed or the missing tiles, which the plumber had taken out in the kitchen, and where two columns of ants ran along the plaster, one upwards, one downwards, and greeting each other with them Touched feelers before continuing on their way ....]
Presence in the no man's place
Again and again, atmospherically dense, ugly, broken, decaying places are captured precisely down to the world of noise: [... a couple of street dogs abandoned by their owner howled at death in an abandoned estate, worm-eaten cherry trees, weeds, the pulley the fountain had no more rope, in the distance perhaps a house without roof tiles with one or two shutters beating in the wind, and an overturned bucket on the tiles in the courtyard ....]
German editions
- António Lobo Antunes: Instructions to the crocodiles . Translated from the Portuguese by Maralde Meyer-Minnemann. Luchterhand, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-630-87035-X
- António Lobo Antunes: Instructions to the crocodiles . Translated from the Portuguese by Maralde Meyer-Minnemann. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-596-14841-3