Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique: Lenz Buchmann's Position in the World (Portuguese Literature) - Softcover

The literature of Gonc alo M. Tavares is radical, and does not allow us to remain indifferent. On the contrary, it makes us uncomfortable and hurt. Tavares is a master of the art of shocking the reader. --Jose Castello

Gonc alo M. Tavares burst onto the Portuguese literary scene armed with an utterly original imagination that broke through all the traditional imaginative boundaries.... I ve predicted that in thirty years time, if not before, he will win the Nobel Prize. --Jose Saramago

The literature of Goncalo M. Tavares is radical, and does not allow us to remain indifferent. On the contrary, it makes us uncomfortable and hurt. Tavares is a master of the art of shocking the reader. --Jose Castello

Goncalo M. Tavares burst onto the Portuguese literary scene armed with an utterly original imagination that broke through all the traditional imaginative boundaries.... I ve predicted that in thirty years time, if not before, he will win the Nobel Prize. --Jose Saramago

In a city not quite of any particular era, a distant and calculating man named Lenz Buchmann works as a surgeon, treating his patients as little more than equations to be solved: life and death no more than results to be worked through without the least compassion. Soon, however, Buchmann’s ambition is no longer content with medicine, and he finds himself rising through the ranks of his country’s ruling party . . . until a diagnosis transforms this likely future president from a leading player into just another victim. In language that is at once precise, clinical, and oddly childlike, Gonc¸alo M. Tavares—the Portuguese novelist hailed by Jose´ Saramago as the greatest of his generation—here brings us another chilling investigation into the limits of human experience, mapping the creation and then disintegration of a man we might call “evil,” and showing us how he must learn to adapt in a world he can no longer dominate.