As naus

by António Lobo Antunes

As naus is set in Lisbon as Portugal's African colonies dissolve in the 1970s. In a contemporary rejoinder to Camoes's conquest epic The Lusiads, Antunes imagines the heroes of Portuguese exploration beached amid the detritus of the empire's collapse. Or is it the modern colonials - with their mixed-race heritage and uneasy place in the "fatherland" - who have somehow ended up in sixteenth-century Lisbon? A white colonial who has married a mulatto woman finds that his papers only entitle him to reside in a ratty bordello, where his wife is forced into whoring at a discotheque. A man named Luis, who has returned from Angola in a ship where Cervantes ripped off all of his material for a "foolish" novel called Quixote, waits on the Lisbon pier with his father's dead body in a casket, as the belongings he shipped home from Africa persistently fail to arrive. And as Vasco da Gama, relieved he no longer has to heed the princes' orders to go discover things, begins winning ownership of Lisbon