| “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. But not all unhappy families are interesting or compelling: some just make us want to puke. In his labyrinthine nightmare of a novel chronicling the last days of a once-wealthy Portuguese family, Act of the Damned, Antonio Lobo Antunes paints a Bosch-like landscape of hell, complete with fornication, cannibalization, incest, drug abuse, insanity, prostitution, and murder. We hear from most members of this grotesque family, beginning with the son-in-law dentist. He seemed pretty horrible, reveling in the pain of dentistry, disgusted by his children, cheating on his wife, and using pain killers to cajole sex, but he turned out to the sweetie pie of the bunch.
To gauge the level of sweetness in this book, another sweetie of the gang is the grandson of the dying patriarch: he hides under tables, then turns to drugs and sex with an old lady, and swears off all soap forever, in an effort to forget the constant niggling of his older site that he wash himself up. This older sister is pretty dirty herself. She has sex with her uncle as often as she can, smokes like a chimney, abuses the dentist she is married to, and has raised two monsters of her own (but who is the father? No idea). The family members only get worse, uglier and more brutish, violent and cruel and greedy: they will feed off each other if necessary to survive but we get the feeling early on that survival is not an option. This family is too far down the pike of evil to ever recover life on earth. Hell is the only option. |
