Long-time friend of António Lobo Antunes, Manuel S. Fonseca, from the publisher Guerra e Paz, mourned the death of the Portuguese writer on the morning of this Thursday, March 5th.
To DN, Fonseca revealed that he shared a large part of his life with Antunes, with whom he was neighbors and had lunch several times over the years. For the editor, what remains “is the deep love for literature that António Lobo Antunes had”.
“It’s not just, let’s say, pride in his own work, which he obviously had and rightly so, but it was the fact that he memorized entire pages by other authors, he was able to recite them. This was the case, for example, of the delight he felt when reciting Agustina Bessa-Luís’s aphorisms, entire pages. His love for Portuguese and international literature was immense. I would say that he lived within literature itself and it is from this life within literature that his novels come.as is the case, right from the beginning, of Elephant Memory”, he stressed.
Fonseca also highlighted the loss that Lobo Antunes represents for culture, characterizing the writer as someone who carried something much greater than his own work.
“What we have lost is, let’s say, a human being who was a repository of the best that writers, novelists and poets around the world have ever done. All of this has flowed into him, as if it were a river.”
In a more personal comment, he imagined the symbolic place where his friend would have left. “For me, personally, Antônio doesn’t die. I don’t know anything about eternity, I have no idea what eternity is, but I imagine some place, in the shadows of the cosmos, where he will be alongside those, the greatest of all, who never won the Nobel Prize”, he continued.
“He will be alongside Marcel Proust, James Joyce or Jorge Luis Borges. And I hope he is happy and lighter than water, as is part of his second novel”, he concluded.
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