Before he became a novelist, António Lobo Antunes was traumatized by his nightmarish experiences in the Portuguese Colonial war of the 1960s and ’70s. Serving as an army psychiatrist in Angola and other “lands at the end of the world,” Antunes—and many of his narrators—witnessed horrors as the Portuguese government tried to violently quell nationalist movements in their African colonies. If the treatment of the locals, the pointlessness of the war, and the living conditions of the soldiers weren’t wretched enough, troops returning to Portugal were faced with new social conditions, and were