We have just stepped out of the metro at Picoas station on the yellow line. The meeting point is the kiosk. This is fitting, as the history of kiosks in Lisbon is partly intertwined with the history of the writer who is the focus of this article: António Lobo Antunes.
This edition features one recent novel. A Simple Procedure is about a surgical procedure that can put an end to mental disorders—where have we heard that before? We also focus on a masterful, unmissable documentary trilogy about the reception and care of psychiatric patients in Paris.
There are a few places in Europe with a large square directly on the water. In the past, this was the place where people arrived to be impressed. The square in Venice is world famous, those in Trieste and Lisbon less so. The Praça do Comércio in Lisbon is not really on the sea, although the Tagus River does look like a sea at this point.
In this edition, a beautiful exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam about artists’ views on mental illness and a film about the problems of a deaf boy.
After his death, Pessoa was buried at the Cemitério dos Prazeres alongside his family. It is a beautiful cemetery, but it is located close to the airport, so planes fly low overhead constantly.
This new episode focuses on unfulfilled childhood wishes and miscarriages (in the film Kind and the novel Hello Baby), the French comedy On Ira, in which a terminally ill old lady wants to end her life but encounters quite a few communication barriers, and the film Hot Milk about a woman who is burdened by unexplained physical complaints and thus restricts her daughter’s life. But first, the razor-sharp, short Japanese novel Hunchback, in which a woman with congenital myopathy talks candidly and pessimistically about her severe physical disability.