Title: Warning to the Crocodiles
Author: Antonio Lobo Antunes, translated by Karen C. Sherwood Sotelino
Rating: 3 stars
Favorite Quote: “I can’t lie, I miss the hound, not my mother, the hound, maybe my mother just a little bit although maybe more the hound, maybe both, maybe my mother more than the hound, maybe only my mother and it might be that’s why if my boyfriend gets the wires mixed up and the whole garage blows sky high, as far as I’m concerned, I swear, I don’t care….” Antunes, Antonio Lobo. Warning to the Crocodiles. E-book, ed., Dalkey Archive Press, 2021.
Review: Thank you to the publisher, Dalkey Archive Press, and the Edelweiss platform for the free e-ARC that I received in exchange for an honest review.
So, I’m going to be completely honest and say, I’m not quite sure I know what happened in this book. This book seemed quite modernist in its experimental, fractured narrative. There appear to be multiple protagonists, each a woman living during a revolution in Portugal. Every perspective seems to be leading towards the ultimate conflict, which, according to the research I did before reading the book, was an actual bomb that was set off during the war. Candidly, much of this summary I was able to glean from the description of the novel as much as from actually having read it.
I realize in my summary, that I’ve used quite a bit of equivocal language. And that’s because I don’t really know what happened. The fractured nature of the narrative was often a bit too fractured to let me fully grasp what was happening from one moment to the next. It would skip in time and point of view, going back and forth between an exposition of place or activity, to the internal monologue of one of the characters. There was something mercurial about the way the narrative changed in time and place and subject-matter, often mid-sentence or mid-thought.
But I think that sense of unease that is created by the constantly questioning what is occurring may be intentional. This is a fraught narrative, a fraught historical period, and therefore, it only makes sense that the story itself, when told well, will also leave the reader feeling on edge.
About that Quote: I think this quote struck me because of how perfectly it encapsulates the vibe of the entire book. Here is a character reflecting simultaneously on her complicated feelings for her mother (in the past), as well as the very present, and real, risks of her boyfriend’s activities during the conflict that was occurring.
Warning to the Crocodiles is out now! Are you going to be picking it up? Share your thoughts below!
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