Fado Alexandrino

Book excerpt: On the tenth anniversary of the return of their battalion from Mozambique, five men attempt to rekindle the fraternal bond that helped them survive the colonial war that was Portugal's Vietnam. In turn, they tell the stories of their lives before, during, and after the revolution that overthrew the long-lived Salazar dictatorship. Internationally acclaimed for his fictionalized memoir of the Angolan war, Antunes has, with Fado Alexandrino, raised a fabulous Lisbon from the ashes of his four failed but unforgettable protagonists, and in the process has firmly established his reputation as the century's foremost novelist in the Portuguese language. Fado Alexandrino is one of the richest novels to come out of Europe in recent years. Moreover, it reveals a society and culture still too little known to the English-speaking world.