By the rivers of Babylon

How to portray simultaneity in the sequential medium of prose? This novel by the highly acclaimed Portuguese novelist Lobo Antunes is in structure quite ordinary, a diary covering two weeks in 2007 when the narrator was in the hospital after abdominal surgery to remove a tumor. Lobo Antunes, a physician by training, did undergo abdominal surgery for cancer in 2007 and wrote a series of articles about the ordeal. Yet little prepares one for this extraordinary book, in which each chapter, covering a single day, and lasting a single sentence, offers a teeming stream of consciousness. To describe it as hallucinatory risks depriving the work of its gritty specificity; fragments of memory, speech, sensation, and perception are somehow kept distinct while tinting the surrounding prose medium. Polyphonic might be the just word, but it is not voices speaking but feelings persisting as images recurring in kaleidoscopic patterns. It is undoubtedly poetic, yet that epithet risks sentimentalizing what is in fact a methodical, careful, exacting exercise in prose, clause after clause: "this tooth that's throbbing, an unexpected heart inside my tooth beating away, I thought the tooth was just bone and yet it's alive." Even pain is alive, and alive is the word for this book, alive and enduring.