The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Spain and Portugal

SPAIN

Miguel de Cervantes’s (1547–1616) Don Quixote (1604/1615, most recently translated in English in 2003 and 2005) is widely considered the first novel of modern Western civilization and remains a cornerstone of contemporary fiction. Fiction flourished in the Spain of that time, with Cervantes just one of many prolific writers, but the mountain that is Don Quixote seems to have turned out to be as much a stumbling as a building block for subsequent Spanish authors.

Much of the twentieth century was a relatively barren time in Spain and Portugal while both countries endured increasingly sclerotic authoritarian rule. One individual in each country dominated the era: Francisco Franco in Spain, from 1939 to his death in 1975, and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, where he was prime minister from 1932 until 1968. The prevailing conservatism in these countries extended to cultural matters as well, but once these men were out of power, the transition to democracy came relatively quickly, in 1974 with the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and with a new constitution in Spain in 1978. Further integration into the international community and greater economic growth followed after both countries joined the European Union in 1986. Portuguese and especially Spanish fiction have flourished in recent years under these more welcoming circumstances. Variations on popular historic fiction have been particularly successful, exemplified in Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s (b. 1951) works and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s (b. 1964) international best seller The Shadow of the Wind (2001, English 2004), which have inspired a seemingly endless spate of imitators.

Among the most damaging and restrictive policies in Franco’s Spain was the suppression of any language other than (Castilian) Spanish. Minority languages spoken in areas with distinctive cultural heritages, most notably Catalan, Galician, and Basque, were marginalized, even as their use became an expression of resistance to the regime. Since 1978, though, these languages have enjoyed official status. As a consequence, the literary output in all of them has increased substantially, though many regional writers continue to write in Spanish—or, as in the case of leading Basque author Bernardo Atxaga (b. 1951), collaborate on the Spanish translation of their own work.

Writing in Catalan

Catalan has what is roughly estimated to be 10 million speakers, mainly in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands (including Majorca and Ibiza). Catalan also is the official language of Andorra.

Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983), who spent almost four decades in exile in France and Switzerland after the fall of Barcelona, is widely considered the greatest modern Catalan writer. While already modestly successful before leaving Spain in 1939, she wrote her greatest works abroad, including The Pigeon Girl (1962, English 1967, and as The Time of the Doves, 1980, and In Diamond Square, 2013). Narrated by the humble, luckless, and ultimately desperate Natalia, The Pigeon Girl is a lyrical stream-of-consciousness narrative of a simple, typical life in the years up to and during the Spanish Civil War. A broader novel with multiple perspectives, A Broken Mirror (1974, English 2006) demonstrates Rodoreda’s command of tone as she renders perfectly the various voices in a multigenerational family saga revolving around a wonderfully manipulative woman who becomes the family matriarch.

The slim collection O’Clock (1980, English 1986) is a fine introduction to the works by the very popular Quim Monzó (b. 1952). O’Clock consists of small stories in a realist vein that take an idea to an extreme, usually with a sudden twist or surprise, and told with a sense of humor. Quim’s approach works even better in a more sustained work such as the novel The Enormity of the Tragedy (1989, English 2008). Despite the comic potential of the protagonist’s affliction—a case of priapism (a permanent erection)—Monzó does not play it only for laughs. The character’s condition is a decidedly mixed blessing and certainly too much for him handle. The Enormity of the Tragedy, too, has several darker edges, with an angry young stepdaughter with strong homicidal ambitions as a foil.

MORE CATALAN FICTION

• Albert Sánchez Piñol’s (b. 1965) Cold Skin (2002, English 2005) and Pandora in the Congo (2005, English 2008) are interesting modern versions of the classical horror and adventure tales and the end of the age of exploration.

• Jordi Coca’s (b. 1947) coming-of-age novel, Under the Dust (2001, English 2007), takes place in the early years of the Franco dictatorship.

• Teresa Solana’s (b. 1962) amusing private-detective capers, A Not So Perfect Crime (2006, English 2008), A Shortcut to Paradise (2007, English 2011), and The Sound of One Hand Killing (2011, English 2013), are set in Barcelona’s upper-class milieu.

Writing in Basque

The fewer than 1 million Basque speakers are concentrated in the Basque area of Spain and France.

In his realist novels like The Lone Man (1994, English 1996) and The Lone Woman (1995, English 1999), Bernardo Atxaga (b. 1951) addresses Basque separatism. The protagonists in both novels are former terrorists trying to move on with their lives. The Lone Man, set during the 1982 World Cup held in Spain, tells the story of a hotel owner harboring two wanted terrorists while also hosting the Polish national soccer team. The novel is a thriller and less introspective than The Lone Woman, which focuses on a protagonist trying to find her place in life again after several years in prison while her past continues to haunt her on all sides.

Atxaga’s best-known work is the inventive Obabakoak (1988, English 1992). This book is more a loose collection of stories within stories (and the occasional essayistic digression) than a full-fledged novel. Despite centering on a Basque village, Obaba, and its colorful inhabitants, many of Atxaga’s tales are not localized, his interest here being instead the universal possibilities of life and storytelling. Atxaga returns to Obaba in several other books, though never with the same ebullience as in Obabakoak. Of these, The Accordionist’s Son (2003, English 2007), with its sweep of Basque history from the Spanish Civil War through the present is Atxaga’s furthest-reaching attempt to register Basque conditions, including the rise and appeal of the militant separatist organization ETA. Although Atxaga eschews straightforward narrative in all his Obaba books—Two Brothers (1985, English 2001), for example, is largely narrated by various animals—this proves distracting in a historical chronicle like The Accordionist’s Son.

Writing in Galician

The approximately 3 million speakers of Galician are concentrated in the province of Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain. The language is more similar to Portuguese than to Spanish.

MORE GALICIAN FICTION

• Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín’s (b. 1938) collection is entitled Them and Other Stories (English 1996).

• Carlos Casares’s (b. 1941) Wounded Wind (1967, English 2004) is a novel about Galician life under Franco.

• Agustín Fernández Paz’s (b. 1947) works such as the Lovecraftian horror novel Winter Letters (1995, English 2015).

Manuel Rivas (b. 1957) is the leading Galician author and is best known for The Carpenter’s Pencil (1999, English 2001), which contrasts the lives of two very different men, both marked by the Spanish Civil War. The story of a Republican doctor and the man who haunts him as jailer but also acts as a sort of guardian angel, The Carpenter’s Pencil presents two men in very different circumstances. The rough, uneducated Herbal wields more power but is forced into moral compromises. The pencil of the title is a constant reminder weighing on his conscience, retrieved after the execution of the artist who used it, a man whom Herbal shot to save him from a more painful death. Rivas’s layered narrative can be confusing, but it is an affecting tale. In the Wilderness (1994, English 2003) has a fairy-tale feel, with characters reembodied as animals and a magical mix of the contemporary with the historical and mythical, though again Rivas’s elaborate structure of overlapping yet separate stories is a denser read than might be expected of such a playful premise and setting.

Spanish Fiction Under Franco

The title figure in Camilo José Cela’s (b. 1916–2002) Pascual Duarte’s Family (1942, English 1946, and as The Family of Pascual Duarte, 1964) is a criminal offering what amounts to both a confession and a defense, describing his poor circumstances and the violence of his life in a brutal, graphic story that is one of the highpoints of twentieth-century Spanish fiction. Its grim realism also set a tone found in much postwar Spanish fiction.

Although several important works are available in English, an astonishing amount of the work by 1989 Nobel laureate Cela still has not been translated, especially his more experimental fiction. An extraordinarily busy novel even by Cela’s standards, The Hive (1951, English 1953) employs a vast number of characters to depict life in Madrid shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War. This lively novel also is one of Cela’s best, with many interlinking pieces, all taking place over only a few days, evoking the vibrancy of a society under a dictatorship. Mazurka for Two Dead Men (1983, English 1992) also is set during the civil war itself. Cela’s contrapuntal presentation is used to good effect in this novel full of violence, death, and vengeance, which focuses on two deaths, years apart. Christ Versus Arizona (1989, English 2007) is a monologue without paragraph or sentence breaks, in which the narrator confesses his uncertainty in a story that seems to be a defense of the looseness of the oral narrative rather than any written record as a way of holding on to history. Its Wild West setting is far away from Cela’s usual Spanish stories, but here again it is mainly about the telling. Similarly, his cryptic Boxwood (1999, English 2002) is a culmination of his experimental efforts.

Several of Miguel Delibes’s (1920–2010) realist novels center on a brief time of transition. In The Path (1950, English 1961), the young protagonist is about to leave behind village life to attend school in the city, while Five Hours with Mario (1966, English 1988) is essentially a widow’s monologue about her deceased husband and their lives together. These novels of reflection and reminiscence, specifically of a certain idealized type of Spanish life, suggest the alternative world to the Francoist system. The Wars of Our Ancestors (1974, English 1992) transcribes a week-long dialogue between a doctor and a prisoner recounting his life and his almost accidental crimes of violence. The novel critiques the culture of machismo, honor, and violence carried down over generations in this fundamentally good character who does not fit into this kind of society, depicting the psychological and cultural impact of Spanish rural society on the individual.

Despite being a master of realist description, especially of the Spanish countryside, Delibes also wrote a great experimental allegory, The Hedge (1969, English 1983), a Kafkaesque tale whose original Spanish title, Parábola del náufrago (Parable of a Shipwrecked Man), is more immediately revealing. The world presented here is dominated by a capitalist monolith in a supertotalitarian world. The novel’s protagonist’s role is that of an accountant who is permitted only to add (but not to subtract or multiply) abstract quantities. When he is no longer capable of functioning in the system, worn down by the dehumanizing nature of his job, he is sent to a retreat. There he becomes obsessed with a hedge, which Delibes uses as a rather obvious symbol. In many of his works, Delibes is concerned with technological development and the destruction of the natural world, and in The Hedge he creates a remarkable dystopia, abstract enough that it has aged well.

• Carmen Martín Gaite’s (1925–2000) evocative novels of memory and storytelling include The Farewell Angel (1994, English 1999), Variable Cloud (1992, English 1995), and the autobiographical The Back Room (1978, English 1983).

• Juan Benet’s (1927–1993) dense, dark flowing narratives of Spanish country life are Return to Región (1967, English 1985) and A Meditation (1969, English 1982).

• Juan Marsé’s (b. 1933) realist novels take place in Spain under Franco.

• Esther Tusquets’s (1936–2012) novels focus on the inner lives of women.

Juan Goytisolo (b. 1931) has spent most of his life outside Spain, in Paris and Morocco, but he has continued to write about his homeland. In these works, Goytisolo is sharply critical not only of the Franco regime but also of the conservatism of Spanish culture and the Catholic Church. With his idealization of Moorish culture and an unrepressed attitude toward sexuality, Goytisolo’s sympathies throughout his work are always with the exiled and excluded.

Goytisolo’s trilogy that begins with Marks of Identity (1966, English 1969) established him as a major author. Its Paris-based protagonist, the photographer Álvaro Mendiola, shares a biography with the author. Mendiola confronts what he sees as the failures of Spain, from its colonial past to its enfeebling present-day conservatism. Raised as a privileged child of a family that has benefited over the centuries from the exploitation he deplores, Mendiola also feels tremendous guilt. Goytisolo describes the stations of his life and moves his protagonist toward possible redemption. The novel is ultimately a challenge to an ingrained way of thinking that sees liberation in an unloosened language, reflected in Goytisolo’s no longer strictly adhering to rules of grammar and punctuation, thereby allowing his words to flow freely.

The trilogy continues with Count Julian (1970, English 1974), which takes its title from the historical figure from Ceuta who aided the Moors in their invasion of Spain in 711, leading to the Islamic dominion over the Iberian Peninsula that lasted until the fifteenth century. The novel presents the reflective wanderings of an exile in Tangier. Though unnamed, he clearly is an extension of the Mendiola/Goytisolo figure in Marks of Identity. The meandering thoughts in this hypnotic narrative return repeatedly to detested Spain, as he vividly imagines its modern-day reconquest by the Moors. Despite being brutally critical of Spanish culture, Count Julian is also an homage, reflected in the many references in the text to and quotations from many Spanish writers. The concluding volume, Juan the Landless (1975, English 1977, revised 2009), is the least conventional in the trilogy. The novel is a loose collection of episodes and the protagonist’s thoughts, opinions, and rants. Goytisolo’s prose style drives much of his fiction, especially in Juan the Landless with its run-on (and cut-off) sentences and lack of capitalization at the beginning of his chapters. The novel ends memorably with the Spanish words collapsing into the phonetic and then mutating into the Arabic, a transformation that marks the abandonment of one culture and the embrace of another.

The compressed Quarantine (1991, English 1994) is a typical creative leap for Goytisolo, who is always willing to try a new or different approach and makes a great effort to match style and content. In the forty chapters of this novella, the narrator grapples with the death of a close friend as he accompanies the deceased on her forty-day journey through the underworld, providing a structure that is both Dantesque and true to Islamic tradition (which foresees such a period between death and eternity). Quarantine is a trance-like prose poem and a prayer for the dead that draws inspiration from and parallels to the first Persian Gulf War and the Spanish Civil War, as well as many artistic representations of death and the afterlife.

The Garden of Secrets (1997, English 2000) is divided into twenty-eight chapters, one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet. The novel centers on a reading circle of narrators trying to piece together a story about a poet who was a friend of Federico García Lorca and was arrested in 1936. With each narrator presenting a different part of the story in a different voice and style, The Garden of Secrets is a dazzling display of Goytisolo’s talents. Though many of his works are clearly meant to be read aloud, in The Garden of Secrets he most obviously embraces the possibilities of shared storytelling.

Goytisolo often directly addresses (and attacks) history in his works, and The Marx Family Saga (1993, English 1996) may well be his most accomplished novel. Unusual for its non-Spanish focus, Goytisolo imagines that Karl Marx and his family have survived to the present day, now recognizing that Marx’s ideas have failed and been abused over the years. Goytisolo is in complete command of his material here, and despite metafictional touches and the juggling of various stories, he presents a brilliant portrait of the failures of an ideology of which he fundamentally is convinced. A very funny novel, The Marx Family Saga is a modern classic that is by far the best literary response to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Javier Marías’s (b. 1951) novels usually have very little plot, but his polished and precise style, along with the compelling character development of his protagonists, exerts a strong fascination. Marías has built up a loosely connected collection of often self-referential works that constantly explore questions of identity. His stories are often based on actual autobiography, even though that, too, is partially fictional: Marías is one of the claimants to the throne of the semifictional Kingdom of Redonda, an uninhabited island in the Caribbean, and he has played that role to the hilt.

The Man of Feeling (1986, English 2003) displays the ease with which Marías can spin intertwined stories. Narrated by an opera singer, it tells of lonely existences adrift and reaching out to others but rarely able to connect. It is a relatively straightforward tale, the art here mainly in the telling, but also hints at some of the narrative games Marías uses in his later works.

In Dark Back of Time (1998, English 2001), a narrator named Javier Marías is the author of a novel, All Souls, set at the University of Oxford, who finds that after its publication the people on whom he had modeled his characters start to acquire the characteristics of their fictional counterparts. Dark Back of Time is a marvelous metafictional companion piece to the real Marías’s All Souls (1989, English 1992), a novel that describes British academic life based on the author’s own experiences. Marías brings an almost documentary approach to Dark Back of Time, complete with photographs, resulting in a very amusing novel of a flummoxed author and the blurred lines between fiction and reality (and cause and effect).

Many of Marías’s works of fiction contain an abundance of literary and philosophical digressions. His trilogy Your Face Tomorrow, consisting of Fever and Spear (2002, English 2005), Dance and Dream (2004, English 2006), and Poison, Shadow and Farewell (2007, English 2009), is the work most representative of this tendency. Despite the promising premise of a narrator finding himself courted by and then in the employ of a branch of the British secret service, these works are largely uneventful. Even though he has a name here—or rather several variations of one—the narrator turns out to be that same unnamed protagonist from All Souls, but in this trilogy Marías goes beyond the involved games of Dark Back of Time. Moving in a world of incomplete knowledge and guesswork, in which his main functions are to observe and translate, the character has ample opportunity to reflect on the past, present, and future. Much of the trilogy has a rambling quality, as the tales loop around the small events described in the works, and Marías’s style, with its long, winding sentences, accentuates a sense of unknowability while also lending the narrative a mesmerizing quality. An intellectual thriller without the easy satisfactions of secret missions brought to an end and all the questions answered, Your Face Tomorrow is a remarkable exploration of confronting a world of endless uncertainties.

Most of the examples of Enrique Vila-Matas’s (b. 1948) extensive body of work available in English, including Bartleby & Co. (2000, English 2004), Montano (published in the United States as Montano’s Malady; 2002, English 2007), and Never Any End to Paris (2003, English 2011), are writer-focused novels consisting of a small fictional foundation that serves mainly to support much larger essayistic ambitions. The narrator of Bartleby & Co. is a man who once aspired to be a writer but now dedicates himself to tracking those who, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, chose not to write or found they no longer could. A paean to not writing, Vila-Matas’s effortless litany of citations and cross-references is a feast for book lovers, as is Montano, in which the protagonist is literally overwhelmed by the literary. He is hardly able to separate fact from fiction, identifies far too closely with the Swiss writer Robert Walser, and encounters Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, French writer Jean Echenoz, and other contemporary authors.

Vila-Matas’s Dublinesque (2010, English 2012) is both an homage to Joyce’s Ulysses and an elegy to the traditional world of literary publishing. Its protagonist, Samuel Riba, a retired publisher of the old school, finds himself adrift when he is no longer immersed in his business yet still sees nearly everything around him in literary terms.

• Julián Ríos’s (b. 1941) fascinating, occasionally baffling, postmodernist works range from the massive footnote- and endnote-filled Larva: A Midsummer Night’s Babel (1983, English 1990) and the similarly word-game-heavy Poundemonium (1986, English 1997) to the somewhat more accessible literary love letters of Loves That Bind (1995, English 1998) and the artist portrait Monstruary (1999, English 2001).

• Antonio Muñoz Molina (b. 1956) writes about uprooted lives and twentieth-century persecution in novels such as the collage-like Sepharad (2001, English 2003) and In the Night of Time (2009, English 2013), as well as his novella In Her Absence (2001, English 2006), a love story of an unlikely couple in which the man suddenly becomes convinced that, despite her appearance and actions being identical to his wife’s, the woman he has returned home to is a simulacrum and not the woman he married.

• Rafael Chirbes’s (1949–2015) work remains largely unavailable in English, despite the promise shown by his debut novel, Mimoun (1988, English 1992), describing the experiences of a Spanish teacher and would-be writer in Morocco. His novel On the Edge (2013, English 2016) is one of the major works of fiction about Spain during the recent financial crisis.

• Javier Cercas’s (b. 1962) Soldiers of Salamis (2001, English 2004), The Speed of Light (2005, English 2006), and, his view of the failed 1981 military coup in Spain, The Anatomy of a Moment (2009, English 2011) are thought-provoking examinations of recent history and writing.

The Popular Explosion

There recently has been a remarkable explosion of popular historical fiction from Spain. Arturo Pérez-Reverte (b. 1951) led the charge with his globe-trotting historical thrillers, including a series featuring a soldier, Captain Alatriste, in seventeenth-century Europe. Pérez-Reverte’s frequently humorous novels rarely tax readers with their skillfully used cultural or historical references. These novels are among the best of this sort of swashbuckling entertainment currently being produced. Pérez-Reverte’s elaborate mystery The Club Dumas (published in Great Britian as The Dumas Club; 1993, English 1996) is typical in its knowledgeable presentation of a specific field—in this case, the world of used books and bibliophiles—but also rarely lets the action flag. Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s (b. 1964) widely imitated international best seller, The Shadow of the Wind (2001, English 2004), stirs together a historical setting (Franco’s Barcelona), bits of romance, a good deal of mystery, and, with its inspired “Cemetery of Forgotten Books,” a strong bookish element as well. It is a good read but has spawned far too many books that follow his formula and take on the same tone.

Even pale imitations of The Shadow of the Wind are preferable to the many Spanish works that try to emulate Dan Brown’s success with The Da Vinci Code (2003). With the Catholic Church still a powerful entity, a rich artistic tradition, and recent experiences with fascism, monarchy, and democracy, Spain has proved to be particularly fertile ground for historical conspiracy fiction, even though many authors still go to the Vatican as conspiracy central. Javier Sierra’s (b. 1971) works, such as The Lady in Blue (1998, English 2007), are fairly typical, though even he felt he finally had to go full Da Vinci in The Secret Supper (2004, English 2006), in which the painting The Last Supper holds all the clues. Other titles that can be lumped together are Matilde Asensi’s (b. 1962) The Last Cato (2001, English 2005) and Jorge Molist’s (b. 1951) contemporary thriller of Knights Templar secrets, The Ring (2004, English 2008). One can only hope that this trend has bottomed out with Juan Gómez-Jurado’s (b. 1977) God’s Spy (2006, English 2007), in which a serial killer is taking out cardinals in the Vatican.

Ildefonso Falcones’s (b. 1959) Ken Follett–size epic, Cathedral of the Sea (2006, English 2008), set in the fourteenth century, cannot entirely ignore the church angle either but is at least a broader work of historical fiction that Falcones tries to make more than a far-fetched conspiracy story. While that offers some relief, Falcones’s writing does not match his long-winded ambitions, producing a passable but unexceptional read.

Mysteries and Other Thrillers

Spain’s recent history and the rapid changes during the post-Franco era are particularly well depicted in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s (1939–2003) novels featuring the famous detective and gourmet Pepe Carvalho. First introduced in the groundbreaking (but still untranslated) Yo maté a Kennedy (I Killed Kennedy, 1972), Carvalho is a CIA operative who worked as a bodyguard for John F. Kennedy and went on to become a Barcelona-based private investigator. Blending social and political criticism with hedonistic enjoyment and some metaphysics and set both in Spain and abroad, Vázquez Montalbán’s Carvalho novels extend considerably beyond mere crime solving.

Writers like Ray Loriga (b. 1967), Rafael Reig (b. 1963), and José Carlos Somoza (b. 1959) have tried their hands at a variety of thrillers that frequently incorporate elements of science fiction. Loriga’s My Brother’s Gun (1995, English 1997) is a novel about a sharp, stylish, angry young man exploring how the media latch onto a crime, and the effect of the distorted coverage on those involved. The futuristic Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore (1999, English 2003) comes disturbingly close to current realities, its narrator a salesman who deals drugs that allow either short- or long-term memory to be eroded. With the narrator himself in a trancelike state, the novel is a surreal journey of wishful forgetting and ugly realities in an odd mix of the hip and the well worn, too often reminiscent of the fictions of the likes of J. G. Ballard, William Burroughs, and Philip K. Dick.

Rafael Reig’s Blood on the Saddle (2001, English 2005) and A Pretty Face (2004, English 2007) also are set in a slightly skewed reality. In both novels, Reig blends pulp crime fiction with science fiction tropes in a world where the Iberian Peninsula has been taken over by the United States. A Pretty Face is posthumously narrated by a murder victim, with the private eye Carlos Clot figuring in both. The roller-coaster twists and turns of these dense dystopian fictions can be confounding, but the sheer creativity of all this makes them worth a look.

José Carlos Somoza is harder to pin down. Some of his novels, such as the disappointing Zig Zag (2006, English 2007), are straight out of the Michael Crichton playbook, but others are more cleverly conceived. In The Athenian Murders (2000, English 2002), Somoza uses Greek philosophy in a murder mystery set in classical times. Whereas much of the text is presented as a record from those times, a translator (from the ancient Greek) of that account makes his presence felt in what turns out to be an inspired twist. For Somoza, it is all about the ideas, and The Art of Murder (2001, English 2004) also has some creative premises, including a new art craze, “hyperdramatic art,” in which real people pose as the artworks. Somoza has some difficulty managing this novel of ideas and, as in Zig Zag, draws everything out far too long, but his thrillers are consistently among the most thought-provoking ones.

Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) is the leading Portuguese novelist in the grand European realist tradition, but otherwise Portuguese literature seems dominated by the offbeat. This small country was once the seat of an outsized empire, but much of its fiction is inward looking, a trait that has become more noticeable with the rise of a vibrant and largely independent postcolonial literature in Brazil and Lusophone Africa. Although many of the works by leading modern Portuguese authors can be considered experimental, they also rely on the familiar with an eye to renewal rather than just novelty that either explicitly or implicitly continues to draw on works by earlier masters. Most prominently, the classic national epic of Portugal in the age of discovery, Luis Vaz de Camões’s (1524–1580) The Lusíads (1572; many English translations), has reverberated through to modern times, most obviously in António Lobo Antunes’s (b. 1942) postcolonial echo, The Return of the Caravels (1988, English 2002), in which the contemporary world and the world of The Lusíads overlap.

The many-faced poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) casts the longest shadow on Portuguese literature. Despite publishing very little during his life, Pessoa created dozens of false artistic identities for himself, including several fully realized heteronyms with their own distinctive personal histories, styles, and interests, and he seemed as obsessed with falsifying life as creating literature. The posthumous prose collection generally known as The Book of Disquiet and attributed to yet another heteronym, the bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, was published in four different English translations in 1991 alone. The 2001 Allen Lane edition (published as a Penguin Classics paperback in 2002) of Richard Zenith’s translation is the most comprehensive version of Pessoa’s work available in English. The work not only represents the synthesis of Pessoa’s literary ambitions, but it also is a fundamental piece of twentieth-century literature that continues to be an important sourcebook and touchstone, as significant to Portuguese literature as Shakespeare is to English or Goethe to German. Even though later Portuguese authors have not gone to Pessoa’s extremes of invention and falsification, he clearly inspired and influenced many of them, including Antunes, Gonçalo M. Tavares (b. 1970), and Nobel laureate José Saramago (1922–2010), who resurrected one of Pessoa’s more famous heteronyms, Ricardo Reis (along with Pessoa himself), in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984, English 1991).

José Saramago’s (1922–2010) novels are often built on a striking premise like the mass affliction that strikes almost everyone in a city in Blindness (1995, English 1997), the Iberian Peninsula loosened from its European moorings and floating out to sea in The Stone Raft (1986, English 1994), or a proofreader’s history-revising intrusion in a text in The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989, English 1996). But readers are drawn into these scenarios by the fantastical elements and also by how Saramago presents the very mundane consequences. In Death with Interruptions (2005, English 2008), for example, death suddenly refuses to strike anyone within the confines of one country, but the realized dream of eternal life jeopardizes everything from the jobs of undertakers and life insurance salesmen to a church that promises a hereafter, as well as the state itself.

The Stone Raft, written around the time of the ascension of Portugal and Spain to what was then the European Economic Community (now the European Union), is an obvious political allegory, with Iberia cut off from Europe and adrift in the Atlantic. With a small cast of characters on their own pilgrimage at the center of the story, Saramago strikes a marvelous balance between the personal and the larger scale.

Saramago presents the consequences of his premises on society at large and especially national institutions, most obviously in the sly Seeing (2004, English 2006), a novel taking place several years later in the same country as Blindness. In what is taken to be an act of unconscionable subversion, a large majority of voters submit blank votes in the government’s elections, a threat to the existing order that drives the state to increasingly desperate reactions, none of which moves an implacable electorate. These novels emerge from the Portuguese experience, but Saramago’s abstractions take them considerably beyond it, making many of them seem like universal fables.

In several works, Saramago rewrites history or has his characters do so. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991, English 1993) presents an alternative version of the Christ story, using the historical record but suggesting alternative motivations and details that give a whole new meaning to the foundations of Christianity. For better and worse, this is a religious work, and for all its literary merit, it is very much a theological thought exercise. The History of the Siege of Lisbon is a wonderful work of reinvention in which a proofreader inserts a single word into a work of history, altering it so that the record contradicts the traditional account and claims that the Crusaders had not come to the aid of the Portuguese at the siege of Lisbon. Even though the mistake is discovered, it cannot be entirely erased, and readers are alerted to it only by an errata slip. Among the unexpected consequences is how the proofreader deals with his mistake and offers an alternative Portuguese history based on this slightly different turn of events. The connection between reality and fiction, and the subjective nature of recording any history or telling any story—a recurring theme in Saramago’s fiction—is especially pronounced in The History of the Siege of Lisbon.

Marked by long sentences and unbroken paragraphs, Saramago’s work can be challenging, but for the most part, it is surprisingly approachable. Similarly, António Lobo Antunes’s (b. 1942) fiction is often dense and, at first sight, considerably more daunting, but it is not inaccessible. The initial challenge is almost entirely visual: many of his novels are marked by paragraph breaks in the middle of a sentence, which is hard not to see as a typesetter’s recurring slip and takes some getting used to.

In his portrayals, Antunes, a psychiatrist, strips his characters to their often very disturbed essence, often using multiple narrators and different perspectives in narratives that rarely unfold chronologically. These novels are not meant to be straightforward but curl back on themselves, are full of repetition, and mix the real and the surreal. With their visceral descriptions of an almost always ugly world, Antunes’s work can seem bleak. Despite some humor, most of it is black, black stuff.

The colonial wars, which Antunes experienced firsthand as a military doctor in Angola, and the personal toll they took, figure prominently in his work. His early, more conventional novels, including South of Nowhere (1979, English 1983) and Knowledge of Hell (1980, English 2008), are searing confrontations with the war and the Portugal to which its protagonists return. Other novels are also built around Portuguese history and conditions but are more surreal in their presentation. The Return of the Caravels (1988, English 2002), a counterpart to Camões’s The Lusíads, and The Inquisitors’ Manual (1996, English 2003), Antunes’s most obvious reckoning with the five decades of dictatorship in Portugal, are among the best in suggesting how much the past weighs on the present as he interweaves the two.

The remarkably talented Gonçalo M. Tavares (b. 1970) is the most promising contemporary Portuguese writer. His O Bairro (The Neighborhood) series consists to date of nearly a dozen short works inspired by literary figures, such as Mister Brecht (2004, English 2006) and Mister Calvino (2005, English 2007). The short stories and pieces in these works are reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s Stories of Mr. Keuner (English 2001), with Tavares showing an astonishing range in his clever use of influence and reference. A larger selection of these works is now available collected as The Neighborhood (English 2012).

Each of the volumes of Tavares’s O Reino (The Kingdom) quartet—A Man: Klaus Klump (2003, English 2014), Joseph Walser’s Machine (2004, English 2012), Jerusalem (2004, English 2009), and Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique (2007, English 2011)—is a close study of individuals; Joseph Walser’s Machine, with its depiction of the title character as a cog in the machineries of modernity, is the standout.

• Lídia Jorge’s (b. 1946) The Painter of Birds (1998, English 2001) is about a woman whose identity is rooted in her complex relationship with her peripatetic father.

• José Luis Peixoto’s (b. 1974) The Implacable Order of Things (published in Great Britain as Blank Gaze; 2000, English 2008) is a gentle novel about rural Portuguese life.

The Portuguese islands of the Azores, farther from Lisbon than London, are small worlds of their own in the Atlantic, and Azoreanborn João de Melo’s (b. 1949) My World Is Not of This Kingdom (1983, English 2003) is about these isolated specks of land. The town at the novel’s center is a rotten place where evil—mainly in the form of the representatives of officialdom, the mayor and the priest—is only eventually surmounted. A story of excesses and abjectness, the colorful narrative creates a kaleidoscopic picture of an unusual world. Like the islands itself, it seems to float halfway between Latin American magical realism and continental neorealism.