'What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? A Novel' by António Lobo Antunes

A Novel

António Lobo Antunes

Translated from the Portuguese by

Gregory Rabassa

W.W. Norton: 590 pp., $19.95 paper

JUST imagine the canon of Western literature without damaged children.

Think "Call It Sleep," "The Book of Daniel," "See: Under Love," just for starters. The history of the novel has been home to a primary school of sensitive and fragile child protagonists all traumatized by tragic parents and overwhelmed by the burdens of that legacy.

"What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?," the latest novel by Portugal's most distinguished living writer, António Lobo Antunes, can surely move to the head of the class of these disfigured portraits of adolescence best forgotten -- except when it comes to the imagination of a novelist.

Paolo, now a grown man, narrates this haunting remembrance of his childhood from inside an insane asylum. He has good reason to be there. He is the son of Carlos, better known as Soraia, a legendary drag queen celebrated as a dancer and gay lover in the seedy corridors of Lisbon's nightlife. Soraia is mocked by everyone and everything that constitutes respectable society. His son became the catcher's mitt for all that shame. It is after Paolo's birth that Carlos transforms himself into Soraia, as if the son's beginnings awakened the father to come out of the closet and head straight into the glittering world of cabarets.

Not a great start for a new family. Paolo recalls the bitter, loveless marriage of his parents, the recriminations, the unpaid bills, the household necessities that were sacrificed for feathers, wigs, silicon, lipstick, jewelry and dresses -- all worn by Paolo's father. Paolo is given over to foster parents equally unfit to raise him, having already been shattered by the death of their own daughter. The drag queen's son was fated never to reside in a home that fostered anything other than the impulse to run away.

And there is Soraia's young male lover, Rui, a heroin addict who eventually commits suicide. There are tales of his sordid family life. The novel rolls out a pluming parade of drag queens, clowns and an even longer list of Soraia's customers and lovers, all of whom make brief appearances in Paolo's fractured, medicated memory. There are doctors and orderlies, a maid who is Paolo's girlfriend, and an assortment of relatives and former neighbors, alive and dead, who haunt Paolo's disturbed mind with nearly the same intensity as the parents and guardian parents who scarred him.