What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780393329483)

The razor-thin line between reality and madness is transgressed in this Faulknerian masterpiece, Antio Lobo Antunes's first novel to appear in English in five years. What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?, set in the steamy world of Lisbon's demimonde--a nightclub milieu of scorching intensity and kaleidoscopic beauty, a baleful planet populated by drag queens, clowns, and drug addicts--is narrated by Paolo, the son of Lisbon's most legendary transvestite, who searches for his own identity as he recalls the harrowing death of his father, Carlos; the life of Carlos's lover, Rui, a heroin addict and suicide; as well as the other denizens of this hallucinatory world. Psychologically penetrating, pregnant with literary symbolism, and deeply sympathetic in its depiction of society's dregs, Lobo Antunes's novel ventriloquizes the voices of the damned in a poetic masterwork that recalls Joyce's Ulysses with a dizzying farrago of urban images few readers will forget.

Author: Antonio Lobo Antunes
ISBN-10: 0393329488
ISBN-13: 9780393329483
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 08/01/2008
Pages: 608
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 8.18h x 5.66w x 0.85d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2008 pg. 715
Library Journal 08/15/2008 pg. 70
New York Times Book Review 11/23/2008 pg. 14
New York Times Book Review 11/30/2008 pg. 18
Village Voice Best Books 12/10/2008 pg. 44