Midnight Is Not in Everyone's Reach

Antonio Lobo Antunes was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1942. He began writing as a child, but at his father's wishes, went to medical school instead of pursuing a career in writing. After completing his studies, Antunes was sent to Angola with the Portuguese Army. It was in a military hospital in Angola that Antunes first became interested in many of the subjects of his novels. Antunes lives in Lisbon, where he continues to write and practice psychiatry.Elizabeth Lowe, born in New York City, has translated over thirty works by Lusophone writers from Brazil, Portugal, and Africa. She was one of the first to translate Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, Rubem Fonseca, Nélida Piñon, and António Lobo Antunes. She is the author of The City in Brazilian Literature (1982), and co-author with Earl E. Fitz of Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature (2008), along with many scholarly articles and book chapters. She is a recipient of an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, National Science Foundation grants for language preservation projects, Fulbright fellowships to Colombia and Brazil, and recognition by the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Her memoir, Translating from the Portuguese: A Life Translated, is forthcoming in 2025. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

“In this elegy for a family, or for the family that could have been, Antunes masterfully evokes the obsessive pull of family life, the peculiar intensity of its joys and miseries. 'We had missed being happy by a thread,' the narrator thinks at one point, 'what did we do wrong.' Readers should not be put off by the narrative disorder and paucity of plot; Midnight Is Not in Everyone’s Reach is fiction of the highest order.” ―The Washington Post“Lobo Antunes, one of the most skillful psychological portraitists writing anywhere, renders the turpitude of an entire society through an impasto of intensely individual voices.” ―The New Yorker“He’s been compared to Faulkner, Dos Passos, García Márquez, Céline, Cormac McCarthy, Malcolm Lowry, Proust, Woolf, Canetti, Gogol, Camus, Cortazar, and Nabokov. The real challenge for reviewers is coming up with a new Master of World Literature Antunes hasn’t been compared to.” ―Quarterly Conversation“Antunes is definitely a writer worth reading for his literary talent and his insights into Portugal's history, geography, and national character.” ―Publishers Weekly“Lobo Antunes’s interweaving of thought, memory and dialogue, both inner and outer, creates as close an experience to the chaos of thinking as is possible on the page. His characters leak trauma while remaining outwardly composed and bland. The inner self is Lobo Antunes’s ultimate preoccupation, especially the exploration of neuroses and phobias.” —Times Literary Supplement“One of the living writers who will matter most.” ―Harold Bloom“Midnight feels like an act of technology as much as it is a narrative; it isn’t even trying to teach you how to use it or what might be harnessed by its powers, but more so providing a model and a mechanism both by which one might gain insight in their own experience of the world before too late.” —Blake Butler, Dividual“Among our country’s greatest authors. Brazil is summed up in his pages.” —Moacyr Scliar“António Lobo Antunes offers Greater Lisbon’s answer to The Sound and the Fury’s Compson family… Deftly rendered in English by translator Elizabeth Lowe, the novel is a nonlinear, minimally punctuated onslaught of memories, interspersed with refrains of unattributed dialogue that give voice to furniture, plush toys, and blackbirds.” —The Drift