The Inquisitors Handbook is a book by Antonio Lobo Antunes that addresses the life of a Portuguese family in its most dramatic and loutish.
It is an inquiry into the past of a family by the voice of several characters. This novel is a reflection of a way of writing that best identify the author, the famous flashbacks, we appreciate in his peculiar literature. It is a rather novel, that is, it all starts at the present time, evoking a gone time, a very specific one of our contemporary history, the main character is a minister of Salazar. We stepped back in time as well, through narrative in multiple voices, trying to explain some of the anxieties and experiences of the characters, under a period that led to the revolution of the carnations. Not a happy book, in what it is the portrait of a generation disillusioned and a failed marriage. Interestingly, almost never are. The stories of Lobo Antunes, always has something of a tragic and hyperrealism experts termed for his type of literature. If you really want my opinion and even if you did not want it I 'll give it any way, I believe that it is an intellectual term to disguise the fact that his novels are always fatal. Not to defend the happy ending that contained the happily ever after, but could have a less negative charge, perhaps a little more optimistic. This does not invalidate the genius of the author, who has also been the target of several candidacies for Nobel Prize for literature. Like it or not, the fact is that the writer does not leave us indifferent, so our relationship with Antonio Lobo Antunes only has two options, either you love or hate, there is no middle ground. This publication is what is called a grotesque romance. The saga of a family through several generations, with a predominant figure, the father and an absent, almost ghostly mother is the picture of a broken home. As for the inquisitors, who are they? That, my friends have to discover for themselves! Read and reflect. Good reading.
