What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?

The razor-thin line between reality and madness is transgressed in this Faulknerian masterpiece António Lobo Antunes''s first novel to appear in English in five years. What Can I Do When Everything''s On Fire? set in the steamy world of Lisbon''s demimonde—a nightclub milieu of scorching intensity and kaleidoscopic beauty a baleful planet populated by drag queens clowns and drug addicts—is narrated by Paolo the son of Lisbon''s most legendary transvestite who searches for his own identity as he recalls the harrowing death of his father Carlos; the life of Carlos''s lover Rui a heroin addict and suicide; as well as the other denizens of this hallucinatory world. Psychologically penetrating pregnant with literary symbolism and deeply sympathetic in its depiction of society''s dregs Lobo Antunes''s novel ventriloquizes the voices of the damned in a poetic masterwork that recalls Joyce''s Ulysses with a dizzying farrago of urban images few readers will forget.