Comics High Literature
Last night António Lobo Antunes was in town. Carrying effortlessly his ironical and slightly presumptuous persona. I can't go into it now.( Besides the evening was just beginning. After the literary apéritif, the main course was "Hoy: El Diario de Adan Y Eva" at the the Teatro Maria Victoria and the postres (bar-hopping) were good too. )
Uncle António said that too many writers describe very serious literary influences - and in doing so plainly lying - when the main impact in fact in their creative lives might have been the adventurous comics, the glorious trash (my word not his) of youthful readership. Like Flash Gordon or Mandrake, Master Lobo-Antunes pointed it out.
Another recurrent theme of his free-association conscience-stream lecture yesterday at the Biblioteca Nacional was (of course) Death. (From the one you witness in the African last colonial spasms of a declining Empire to the un-Godly death of a child with terminal leukemia).
Pressed upon what were his books about he said in that inimitable disdainful but simultaneously childish tone: "I keep writing the death of Mandrake".
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