Best of
Portugal
1980
The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers
Eça de Queirós - 1980
He accomplishes this magnificently in The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers"
Knowledge of Hell
António Lobo Antunes - 1980
The reader joins Antunes on a journey both real and phantasmagorical as he travels by car from a vacation in the Algarve back to his hated work as a psychiatrist at a Lisbon mental institution. In the course of one long day and evening, he carries on an imaginary conversation with his daughter Joanna, observes with surreal vision the bleak countryside of his nation, recalls the horrors of his involuntary role in the suppression of Angolan independence, and curses the charlatanism of contemporary psychiatric "advances" that destroy rather than heal.