Novel ‘The Splendor of Portugal’ talks about tragic consequences of „glorious“ colonial past, and mercilessly cuts into the diseased tissue: a mixture of guilt, self-hatred, treason and political misbehavior. The title of the novel was taken from the Portuguese national anthem and it portrays a very destructive picture of Portugal in all its tragedy, relieved of false grandeur.
The plot is set between Ajudo, Damaia and Estoril, with Angola in the background – the protagonists all come from that African country: Isilda, her husband and their children; Carlos, a mulatto born out of wedlock; Ruio, the epileptic; and at the end Clarissa, seducer and a prostitute. They are all marked with an unusual loneliness which isolates them, drives them to revolt, and leaves them with a scar that has not healed completely: their lives represent – Angola.
Brutality composed of hatred and bitterness present in this novel is already a recognizable feature of Lobo Antunes, but in this novel he took a step forward in narrative and language processes, so the book turns into one of the most representative novels of Portuguese literature. It could be described as a “beautiful horror”, because the book is void of sentimental feelings and relaxing picturesque motives, and filled with desperate violence in which words stick to the dismembered bodies and ravaged land in order to form an eternal film of obsessive call for horror.
The story starts and ends at December 24 1994, and in time leaps we learn about what was once the Portuguese Empire in Africa and about the feats of the “glorious ancestors”. On the horizon of ‘The Splendor of Portugal’ rises Africa destroyed by a pointless war, let alone, and left by even God.
Novel ‘The Splendor of Portugal’ tells about the colonial past as a stain on the face of the nation that cannot be washed off, and calls for the reexamination of personal and collective national history.