António Lobo Antunes's Midnight Is Not in Everyone's Reach

10 associative thoughts about my experience reading the Portuguese master's major doorstop in two long sittings

1. Read most of this 573p beast on flights to and from Baltimore to Seattle during the last week. I like taking long books on long flights since it’s a great way to make yourself a captive audience to something you might need much longer to break down otherwise. I was seated in the middle seat of an exit row on the way out, which made holding up the doorstop between two other men a bit of a feat. The bro to my left was drinking and clearly trying to induce conversation with anyone who’d listen, taking to peering over my shoulder at the page when I put on my headphones. I enjoy reading atypical shit on planes for this reason also, forcing fragments of strange prose into the heads of people who’d never otherwise know you could talk that way. He stopped looking pretty quickly, resorting instead to trying to get the young mother in the seat in front of him to let him crack jokes in her ear. On the flight home I sat next to a child traveling alone who fell asleep with his whole body hunched over like a rag doll, often falling onto the lady on his other side. It all felt appropriate to the tone of the novel in a strange way, like life adapts to what it entertains.

2. Despite its heft, Midnight Is Not in Everyone's Reach (Dalkey Archive, 2025, translated by Elizabeth Lowe) turned out to be a perfect cross-country flight novel, ending within minutes before I reached my final destination home. The voice of the book is very fluid, stacking run-on sentences in a reflective monologue interspersed with speech fragments from various other characters, which on the surface appears complex for its multivocality and lack of a firm central plot, but under the hood has a swimming style that keeps the reader moving without needing to look back. The basic premise—a woman returns to the summer home of her youth for the last time—is spread over three sections, representing three days of associative memory about her family, including her parents, a dead older brother, and a younger brother who is deaf. For the most part, we remain mired in her past, almost free-associatively following the narrator from one rung to the other the way one might when a little tipsy or otherwise overcome by spirits close to death.

3. The novel is set into three sections, one for each day the adult narrator visits her past, and each of those section is split into 10 subsections that provide a vague but pleasing structural course similar to what it might feel like to be lost in rumination while overcome with emotion, starting and stopping over and over rather than simply being drowned all in one go. Though the narrative thread is almost entirely associative, there’s just enough of a remove to feel like we’re floating instead of simply being batted around and asked to experience the narrator’s life as if it’s our own, which in turn provides the narrator license to basically do whatever she wants, as should someone in mourning. Occasional glimpses of the present day era—set in 2011, though told almost entirely in retrospect—remind us of the narrator’s POV as separate and distinct from the views of herself as a child by commenting on her positioning in the house and how it affects her memory, creating a surprisingly fresh interpretative layer to the novel’s more major mode. I had to keep reminding myself this was a more recently written and published novel by a novelist who is still alive, and not a classically late modern 1970s novel where the continued digression itself is the take. Frequently, the pleasure of the work came from detaching from the larger view and allowing the musicality of the sentences and the senses of progress by accumulation, becoming immersed in the narrator’s memories so closely they might as well be memories of one’s own, filtered through the screen of an Other.

4. Like swimming in a river, meaning derives from overlapping associations and sensory difference and repetition, allowing the reader to ride along inside the skin not of someone’s memories, but of their experience of memory becoming combined in retrospect. Sudden meta or convergent moments in which moments of clarity emerge tend to come from revelation at the end of a long string rather than a narrative plot twist or a deus ex machina, underlining the necessity of shared experience to imbue emotion from narrator to reader rather than a logic or even a plot. Like with the nouveau roman, particularly in works by Claude Simon and Robbe-Grillet, the reader is transported by feel and sensation into place that would otherwise be impossible to put on paper—more so like bullion than its cube, but deceptively so, forcing your brain to move off the normal ways it gathers signals and just ride.

5. Rather than simply being moved by the story, I enjoyed feeling surprised to learn facts through the lens of a child while only realizing as an adult what those facts had meant and how they would come to shape her life. The drawbacks of more basic coming-of-age novels feel suddenly quite stark when delivered with a purpose that doesn’t directly translate into totems, but grows over time and takes hold upon being examined layer by layer. For a novel generally driven by retrospect, it feels very outwardly relatable and potent in a way similar to sorting through an estate at the end of one phase of life and assessing, if never necessarily evaluating, what it had meant to be alive and how you were delivered in time to arrive as you are even in the absence of those who’d once been right beside you.

6. Coming back to musicality, I often found myself imagining Antunes reading the pages aloud in the back of my head. Despite its modular simplicity, there’s a clear symphonic feel in the way he allows the utterance to deliver energy, rather than language all on its own. Particularly in the loose way he interweaves dialogue into the thoughtflow, using tags that append directly from the memory itself, the novel begins to take on the feel of a haunted echo chamber, within which time and place become fluid and interchangeable, and therein something larger than simple storytelling and sentimentality emerge. The significant events of one’s life are rarely held linearly by heart, and may blur or cohere in ways that logical organization allows little interference upon; Antunes is on the level of Beckett and Fosse when it comes to the whole being more than the sum of its parts, unpacking the nature of experience itself over relegating that experience to another medium doomed to fail. Instead, the failure is the whole, and not in a bad way—in fact, it turns out to be the only way to actually time-travel while sitting in one place only to find it still mutant and online despite being over, the most arcane science of all.

7. I only marked one paragraph fragment on one of the pages, dog-earing it for lack of a pen, p 520-21: “if my older brother were here and I think he’s not but who can say for certain what the destiny of the dead is, at certain times they’re so close that I can feel their breath, at other times so far away and you don’t feel a thing, sometimes my father is with me, others, as much as I call him, at most a whisper.” As is evident here, punctuation and grammar is all but a myth here, allowing the flow of the page to run like a heartbeat while pressing deep into the folds between ideas. In this way, absences and recognitions carry as much weight as do the more clear images and quotations the narrator calls forth, which to me feels like a far more realistic version of what it’s like to think from inside a concentrated era of emotion, such as this narrator finds herself at a major inflection point between past and present.

8. There’s very little future to be had here, as such, and I find myself wanting to argue that this is because prose may often pretend to see the future, when in reality it’s more providing the means by which we reach ahead by looking back—not because we want to be comforted or to revel in glory days, but because the answer to realizing and taking hold of fate comes on an ambience, not a how to. Though the narrator is a child throughout the majority of her remembered events, the gift of being able to sit in her head as she synthesizes and refracts parts of her experience through the lens of herself as an adult is revelatory as a practice as might be in content—it takes so much of one’s life to understand what interminable meaning might arrive from where we’ve already been, unequipped as we are to know what to do with it until more of the future becomes revealed.

9. In this way, Midnight feels like an act of technology as much as it is a narrative; it isn’t even trying to teach you how to use it or what might be harnessed by its powers, but more so providing a model and a mechanism both by which one might gain insight in their own experience of the world before too late. Though trauma grows a person, it’s hard to appreciate how until enough distance is accrued between signifier and signified, and yet Antunes is so deft, so unassuming in his model that by the end of the book it feels like a chip has been slipped into the mind—not an archive of stories, but a story of archives. If optimization bros were really into becoming optimized instead of simply trying to pretend their way into looking hot, they might ask to be forced to study this model instead of just jacking it to Houellebecq and co.

10. I felt a great relief when the book was over—quite a different register than the ‘I wish it would never end’ feel we often expect from books we love. I found I almost immediately couldn’t quite describe where I’d just been, and that precious few things jutted up out of the novel in retrospect, like it had just passed through me like a ghost and left little to hold onto besides the feel and the peculiar bells and whistles all throughout. As an unwieldy object full of oddly syncopated prose that rarely lights any one place for very long, the novel’s marathonic aspects served a perfect rigging for the ideation gleaned between the lines of such a vivid and unrelenting string of thoughts, like I couldn’t have gotten it inside me any other way. In a landscape where so many narrative objects feel hell bent on making the reader see it their way as an act of brand development, Antunes brands by dint of having more to say than can be said, and doing so with style that denecessitates branding and herd-wrangling at all—it is what it is and could never be otherwise, and thereby it commands attention whether we have it to give or we don’t. If literature stands any chance against the artificial, it seems it must do so both as an act of refusal and an attempt to make felt what otherwise would remain unknown until too late.