António Lobo Antunes, "a prolific Portuguese novelist whose multilayered narratives dissecting the faultlines of Portuguese society made him a literary giant in his native country and further afield," died March 5, the New York Times reported. He was 83. His death was announced on social media by Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro and by his publisher, Dom Quixote.
Antunes published more than 30 novels and collections of writings in which he "charted Portugal's halting emergence from the crippling dictatorship of Dr. António de Oliveira Salazar from 1932 to 1968, and its failed colonial wars in Africa," the Times noted, adding that his "work as a doctor provided him a lens through which he explored the battered psychology of his diminished nation."
His many honors included the Jerusalem Prize in 2005 and the Camões Prize, Portugal's highest literary honor, in 2007.
Elephant Memory and South of Nowhere, his first two novels, were released in 1979 and brought him acclaim in Portugal and abroad. His experiments with form and language were praised by critics. Harold Bloom described him as ''one of the living writers who will matter most,'' and George Steiner called him ''a novelist of the very first rank,'' comparing him with Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner.
Antunes's other books include Fado Alexandrino (1983); The Inquisitors' Manual (1996); and What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? (2001).
Noting that in the English-language world, Antunes's works remain obscure, the Times wrote that Richard Zenith, one of his translators, had observed in the Times Literary Supplement in 1997 that all four of his translated novels were by then out of print in Britain, adding in an interview: ''Anglo-Saxon literature really likes a good story. English doesn't put up as easily with ambiguity. Latin literature revels in it.''
''I don't want people to 'read' my novels,'' Antunes told Maria-Luisa Blanco, who published a book of conversations with him in 2001. ''I want people to live them, to 'catch' them, the way you would catch an illness.''
Among his last published works was Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water (2016), which explored, in experimental prose, the aftershocks of the Angolan War. Describing Antunes as "an author who practiced psychiatry," the Times wrote that "he wanted his writing to mirror the vagaries of the human mind."