"One of these days I'll beach right here, devoured by fish like a dead whale," muses Rui S., portly thirty-three-year-old political historian and hero of the latest dazzling novel by Ant"nio Lobo Antunes. Little do we or Rui S. realize how prophetic his whiny lamentation proves to be until the close of this beautifully realized masterpiece of remembrance. Unable to accept the facts of his life"his mother's imminent death by cancer; his estrangement...