06.29.1111:37 PM ET  A Great Antiwar Novel  Jose Saramago might
have won the Nobel, but the great Portuguese novelist is António
Lobo Antunes. William Giraldi on the harrowing fiction of this
overlooked master—and why he captures war like few others.  The
Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes is the most important
living writer you've probably never heard of. A household name
in Portugal, a celebrity across the Latin world and an icon in
France, he has nevertheless remained partially obscured in the
international shadow of his near-contemporary, the late José
Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize in 1998. Saramago's death last
year might have promoted Lobo Antunes to Portgual's greatest
storyteller but he has been all along Saramago's better as the
insistent siren of Portuguese history, the dark crooner of a
nation's conscience. Lauded by the best minds in
literature—Harold Bloom, George Steiner, and J.M. Coetzee among
them—Lobo Antunes crafts macabre fever dreams as if possessed by
an abler Poe, and few other