Perpetual Nobel Prize contender António Lobo Antunes has written the most stunning, flourishing, novels about war I have ever read. The book consists of one long monologue — an ex-soldier in a bar tells of his involvement in the Portuguese war on Angola to a speechless woman he is trying to seduce. The past bleeds into the present and memories become as palpable as that which is in front of his face as our narrator becomes more and more intoxicated. Certainly there have never been hundreds of novels written about the stupidity and baseness of war, but none written with Lobo Antunes's incomparable style — awe-inspiring, sprawling metaphors and other-worldly descriptions of life as a medic during the war butt up against devastating, poignant confessions of an ex-soldier's loneliness and psychological tumult readjusting to life after war. Comparisons to Faulkner, Melville, and Garcia Marquez are not without warrant, and I highly recommend this for all of their fans. - Aaron