The Judas kiss
The Judas Kiss is a novel by António Lobo Antunes , the original title of the Portuguese edition is Os Cus de Judas (= literally The Ass of Judas , figuratively The Ass of the World ).
overview
A drunken war veteran talks about the horrors of the Angola War in a monologue in a bar in Lisbon . The book is the first in a series of novels by the Portuguese author in which he explores the crimes and horrors of Portugal's last colonial war.
Classification in the overall work
The novel was written at the same time as the debut novel Elefanten Gedächtnis and was published in the same year. The book was a huge hit, like his 1983 veteran novel Fado Alexandrino , and had to be reprinted in several editions. As in his novel Good evening you things down here , the horror and senselessness of the war in Angola are the basic themes of the novel.
content
The framework story takes place in Lisbon after the war in Angola . A veteran reports to a woman one afternoon, evening, and night about time. He slides back into childhood in complex, associative images and excursions. These mix with the trip to the front at Nova Lisboa. The dreamy perceptions of the first-person narrator of the zoo and of a roller skater are also broken by the statement of an old patriarch, "Fortunately, the military will make a man out of him" . In the memory of the first-person narrator, the spirit of the fascist Salazar hovers over his family to save them from communism. The pre-military training turns into a boy scout camp where the recruits are put in uniforms that look like Mardi Gras costumes . During the crossing to southwest Africa, the first-person narrator thinks about who the coffins in the ship's belly are for. Once in Luanda , the monologue leader very quickly loses his childlike nature by visiting brothels and thinking about the world and the fortress in this province. Little by little, the alcohol level rises in the frame story, and the thoughts become more erratic. Images from the front mix with the temptation to seduce the nameless woman.
Embedded in horrific images of dying soldiers are the attempts after the war to cope with the trauma. At the end, it is already day, he remembers in the final chapter of the old patriarch, who stated: " You have become thinner. I have always hoped that the military would make a man out of you, but with you it is hopeless. "
interpretation
The book is considered to be the "guilty conscience of Portugal". It stands for the multitude of young recruits who have been sent into a senseless war. After the Angola War, Portugal had to grapple with its history and self-perception as a "colonial power". The novel was considered a taboo break at the time because it denounced the military and its jargon , the role of the Catholic Church and its representatives.
Reviews
- Uwe Timm writes in Der Spiegel among other things: " .... the literary journey of knowledge [leads] inwards and outwards, with frequent digressions. Detours and repetitions. This narration does not follow any linear causality, in long hypotactic sentences it jumps, associatively Linking events, back and forth between the past, the past and the present. The horrors are expressed in a haunting imagery ... "
- Drews, J. In Süddeutsche Zeitung, review on May 6, 1987
- No later novel Antunes can match the debut 'Der Judaskuss'. According to Leopold Federmair in the NZZ.
- Florian Borchmeyer writes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung among other things: ".. Reading as torture. The novel as a penal colony. Not exactly a tempting prospect for an edifying after-work reading, and therefore probably difficult to sell. Those who, however, are overcome by virtuosity and musical mastery of the text, submissively exposing the torturer Lobo Antunes to punishment, is rewarded at the end by the endorphin committee that makes people happy ... "
expenditure
The first edition was published in 1979 by Dom Quixote Lisbon.
- Judas kiss . Translated by Ray-Güde Mertin . Munich, Hanser Verlag 1987. ISBN 3-44613970-2