‘Knowledge of Hell’ by Antonio Lobo Antunes    (1980) – 298 pages                 Translated from the Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers

The Portuguese writer Antonio Lobo Antunes published ‘Knowledge of Hell’ when he was 38 years old. At that point he was only a part-time writer, and he still had a psychiatry practice in Lisbon, but by this time he was absolutely disgusted with his chosen profession. In this novel Antunes puts in all the venom that he has accumulated over the years toward psychiatry.

The main character in this impressionistic fever dream of a novel with its unstoppable stream of metaphors is Antonio Lobo Antunes himself. He is about 40 years old and is looking back on the hellhole that his life has been so far. After college, he had been sent down to Angola as a medic with the Portuguese army in their nasty fight against Angolan independence. After Portugal finally withdrew from Angola, he came back to Portugal to become a psychiatrist in a mental hospital. His wife Isabel by whom he had two children divorced him recently.

“Wasn’t it you who said psychiatry is the most noble of the medical specialties?” he asked. “Shit, if I’d known what I know today I’d have been a dentist.”

The previous lines are Antunes’ most mild criticism of psychiatry. Here is his more typical criticism of their treatment of mental patients:

“We have amputated them from past and future and reduced them, through injections, shock treatment, insulin-induced comas, to obedient animals with expressions grounded by apathy and fear.”

The psychiatric office is shown to be a place where “anyone who enters here, he ends up losing”. Antunes also has a negative opinion of his fellow psychiatrists:

“the dream of guys like these is to be psychiatrists by divine prerogative, to be right by papal infallibility, to impose their pompous and melancholy order on the disorder of others”

We get Antunes’ full diatribe as he with his daughter Joanna drive to the beach:

“I’m going to get away from this shit for a while, get away from this benign concentration camp, this pathetic inferno, my monotonous job of distributing pills.”

Daughter Joanna is the only benign being in this novel.

Later Antunes visualizes what it would be like if the other doctors decided to put him in the mental institution too. Then things take a phantasmagorical turn toward cannibalism when we get a full dinner party of psychiatrists, mental patients, and even soldiers from Angola where the main course of the dinner is Antunes himself.

Antunes is a writer with whom the reader is constantly in danger of getting too much – too many metaphors, too many adjectives, too many lists, too many abrupt story turns, too many off-the-wall characters, too many long, long sentences, too much venom, too much craziness. Or as Wikipedia puts it, “His style is considered to be very dense.” Did I mention that ‘Knowledge of Hell’ is also quite humorous at times too?

Readers who are reading translations are at the mercy of the translator, and I wonder what my opinion would have been if I had read a different translation.

However anyone who has their own doubts about the mental health industry would do well to read this account by this jaundiced insider, Antonio Lobo Antunes.

Grade:   B