Dance of the damned

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Dance of the Damned is a novel by António Lobo Antunes . For the book, which was published in 1985, Antunes received the great prize for novels from the Portuguese Writers' Association.

Classification in the oeuvre

The sixth novel is a family story whose main character Djego is the head of an old family of large landowners. Similar to the Inquisitor's Handbook , a polyphonic ensemble revolves around an old patriarch, but here in chapters that are each described from the perspective of a different family member. As in most of Antune's novels, the plot revolves around the history of Portugal after the Carnation Revolution , which shook an entire class of society through waves of nationalization and expropriations.

construction

The novel is divided into five major sections. An untitled chapter, which describes the morning after getting up from the point of view of Doctor Nuno, is added. The sections are overwritten:

  • Afternoon,
  • Eve of the festival; A side; B-side (mother Ana's monologue, and Ana's monologue)
  • first day of the festival (Francisco's monologue)
  • the second day of the festival - On the eve of my death (The Old Djego Monologue)
  • the third day of the festival - the importance of the machine for influencing the development of schizophrenia (divided into five sections with the heading "Chapter")

content

The novel begins in the world of the dentist Nuno. Mafalda is the ex-lover, an embarrassing incident occurs in which Nuno is completely undressed and surprised by Mafalda's cleaning lady. After surviving this, Nuno ends up in the house of his narrow-minded, middle-class parents, who are busy with puzzle books and card games. There Nuno receives a call from his wife, who informs him that her grandfather will die. Nuno is supposed to pick up Brother Francisco. Francisco lives with a withdrawn old woman named Gisela and this child is lethargic and retarded for his age. In a short section, however, Nuno tells of the time in seven years, then Francisco will be a celebrated artist and astonish bearded art connoisseurs in Moroccan clothing. In the romance of the festival, however, he is a scared twelve-year-old boy with a boy scout backpack, the trick of pulling his head to one side and hiding under tables. The drive to the country, where the grandfather dies, is stopped by a traffic control, which ends in a farce, after which Nuno fled. Ana and her brother struggle alone and arrive at the estate late at night, where the rest of the family is gathered. In the village of Monsaraz, located in the Alentejo province not far from the Spanish border, the annual village festival takes place at this time. The highlight is a bullfight that ends with the death of the bull, although this is not common in the rest of Portugal. At the same time, the assembled family, long-established large landowners, who have come a long way, are waiting for the old man to die. The cry of fear “The communists are coming” leads Leonore and her husband to urge them to split up the inheritance and have the degenerate siblings sign notary forms. The eve of the festival is remembered in section A from the point of view of Ana's mother, who regrets her absurd marriage to a railway freak Concalo, who she had never touched for many years of marriage. The B-side takes place seven years later, it is a monological reminder of Ana's escape to Brazil and a return to take care of her mother's security. The first day of the festival is also described seven years later as a monologue of Francisco, who remembers the time of the great festival when his grandfather died and his father had insufficient attention for him.

The second day of the festival is ultimately the view of the old man himself, who is terminally ill and sees Leonore and her domineering husband looking for values ​​and turning the house upside down. He remembers the time with his wife and that they didn't understand each other, depreciated and hurt each other, he admits that he is not even sure whether his children are all his because his brother was before, during and after marriage was his wife's lover and yet at the end of his life he feels bitterness about this loss. He also remarks that he should have raised his children with the whip, because despite his last hour he is disappointed by the greed of his daughter Leonor and her sex-obsessed husband, but nothing remains of the inheritance but debts. When the bull dies in the last big section, on the third day of the festival, the old man dies too, now the characters have their say in five final chapters with crude memories filled with hate, Francisco makes the beginning. This is followed by Ana, Leonor, Nuno and finally Leonor's bossy man with the final monologue while the revolutionaries are on the march. On a list, the name of a family is underlined in red, it only remains to cross the river to nearby Spain.

characters

  • Edward G. Robinson also called Nuno a dentist from Lisbon also called Doctor
  • Mafalda, Nuno's ex-lover
  • Ana the doctor's wife, granddaughter of Old Djego
  • Ana's mother
  • Goncalo the feeble-minded father of Anas, with a pronounced train instinct
  • Leonor the old man's daughter and her bossy husband
  • Francisco, Ana's twelve year old brother
  • Giesela the old maid and governess of Francisco
  • the Mongoloid, daughter of the old man, who has a daughter from Leonor's husband and this daughter is in turn impregnated by Leonor's husband.
  • The Patriarch Djego

interpretation

According to Kindler's literary dictionary, the death of the patriarch is seen as a symbol for the death of an entire social class in post-revolutionary Portugal. This layer in Lobo Antunes' novel consists of incestuous family structures. Leonore's husband has been following all the women in the family for many years and impregnates everything that is offered to him regardless of the degree of relationship. The neglected, frightened brother Anas, Francisco, is also ghostly, who spends his time under the table or in other hiding places, but then, as if captured by a dialectical phrase, speaks with thoughts and has something like a career as an artist, connected with an actress twenty years her senior and a weakness for uncleanliness, sloppiness and poor hygiene. The Mongoloid only makes grunts and rounds off the horror cabinet and ends up sung to herself, crouching in a corner, her gray hair hanging on her face like a sick little turtledove. Only Ana seems to want to take care of her mother and is really worried about her grandfather. While Leonore and her husband want to save whatever can no longer be saved. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calls the novel "a hallucinatory-witty satire on stupidity, lies and greed."

Stylistic devices

In the repetition of simple statements in the nominative: [... ... This is Ana ... ...], modern means of storytelling are inserted in the B-side chapter. This repetition is interrupted, for example, by minimal acts and monologizing memories. But also through leaps in time and pages of association chains, which when following Antune's thoughts become a summit climbing experience, from which one is brought back into the action by repeating the simple starting sentence “This is Ana”. Often it is minimal actions that lead to memories and times. The metaphor and other linguistically luscious images are charged in an extremely dense, perhaps even overloaded manner. The dance of Arthur Schnitzler with its monologue structures to be compared in the local literary history most likely only Schnitzler you have probably evil vulgar, obscene and imagine unabashedly, to get to Antunes. This motivation could have moved the publisher or the translator to change the literal translation of the title: Game of the Damned to the form Round Dance of the Damned .

expenditure

literature

  • Rainer Hess (Hrsg.): Portuguese novels of the present: new interpretations . TFM Verlag Teo Ferrer de Mesquita, 1993, ISBN 3-925203-32-X

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ donagataempontodecruz.com ( Memento of the original from January 28, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.donagataempontodecruz.com
  2. ↑ perlentaucher.de
  3. ↑ randomhouse.de
  4. ↑ A books diary: Book reviews from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . Verlag Die Zeitung, 2000