António Lobo Antunes suffering from dementia
The novelist is in ‘exile from reality’ and no longer writes, according to his biographer.
What?
A new, revised and expanded biography of António Lobo Antunes, often described as Portugal’s greatest living author, will hit bookshops on October 3.
Expresso, which had exclusive access to the book, ‘A Long Journey with António Lobo Antunes’, revealed this week that the it will describe and reflect on the silence, the ‘dementia’ and total erasure of the writer, saying that he is now ‘unrecognisable’.
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Background?
Over the course of two hundred hours, in dozens of interviews conducted over the last 15 years, biographer João Céu e Silva had the opportunity to completely revisit the life of António Lobo Antunes, including the state of dementia ‘that gradually invaded him’ and made him ‘unrecognisable’.
The journalist says that the writer, as well as not writing or smoking anymore (something that, for him, would be like breathing), no longer recognises those around him, having lost, over the last couple of years, ‘the notion of the world around him and of himself’.
First released by Porto Editora in 2009, the new edition of “A Long Journey with António Lobo Antunes” adds information to the interviews, notes and reflections that João Céu e Silva has made over the years, including a more detailed description of the phone call in which he confirmed the deterioration of António Lobo Antunes’ mental health.
It was December 2021 and the writer “was like the characters in many of his novels, who repeat the same thought throughout the book, as if absent from life and continuing to live”.
For Céu e Silva it then became clear that many of Lobo Antunes' episodes of eccentricity were in fact “signs of the disease”.
“It was during those 27 minutes that I foresaw the ongoing outcome of António Lobo Antunes’ life,” quotes Expresso.