The peculiar prose style António Lobo Antunes has been developing since the publication of his fist novel (Memória de Elefante, 1979) until the date, in a vast prose work that encompasses more than three decades and comprises 27 novels and various short-stories' books, recurs constantly to techniques typical of the 20th Century experimentalism.
Far too obvious is the influence of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury technique, and equally strong are echoes of Joyce's and Woolf's prose experiments.
What is astonishing in ALA's work, however, is the fact that he starts from those premises not just to demonstrate that such a prose in Portuguese is possible, with a conscient attention to readers' and critics' reaction: on the contrary, given the dimension his prose work acquired in time and in terms of public recognition and success, he manages somehow unexpectedly to create a new prose style that does not possess the ephemeral and momentarily iconoclastical charachteristics that usually experimentalism shows. His style becomes more and more canonical – novel after novel – and more and more experimental at the same time. From a historical/critic point of view, he inaugurated a new season in prose, in which what was experimental and anti-traditional acquires somehow the status of new tradition.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
