As naus

As naus is set in Lisbon as Portugal's African colonies dissolve in the 1970s. In a contemporary rejoinder to Camoes's conquest epic The Lusiads, Antunes imagines the heroes of Portuguese exploration beached amid the detritus of the empire's collapse. Or is it the modern colonials - with their mixed-race heritage and uneasy place in the "fatherland" - who have somehow ended up in sixteenth-century Lisbon? A white colonial who has married a mulatto woman finds that his papers only entitle him to reside in a ratty bordello, where his wife is forced into whoring at a discotheque. A man named…