By the Rivers of Babylon (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780300233414)

A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal's most celebrated writers

"One of the essential writers of our tormented times."--Alberto Manguel, Times Literary Supplement

"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. . . . Even pain is alive, and alive is the word for this book, alive and enduring."-- Michael Autrey, Booklist

Incapacitated after the removal of a malignant tumor, the narrator, Antio, spends his days in a Lisbon hospital enduring the humiliations of severe illness. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he revisits fragments of his life and the people who passed through it. He recalls the village where he lived as a child near the Mondego River amid the eucalyptus and pines, his parents and grandparents and their tight-knit community of potato farmers and tungsten miners, and the woman he loved--an unexpected polyphony of voices and places sounding in sharp counterpoint to debilitating pain.

By the Rivers of Babylon conjures the past and the present all at once, revealing the power of memory to embolden us in the face of extraordinary suffering. This is Antio Lobo Antunes's homage to the beauty of a cherished life in its confrontation with imminent death.

Author: Antonio Lobo Antunes
ISBN-10: 0300233418
ISBN-13: 9780300233414
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/25/2023
Pages: 248
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 7.60h x 5.40w x 1.60d

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 04/01/2023 pg. 16
Library Journal 04/13/2023 pg. 1