Product Description

When King and Church exercise absolute power what happens to the dreams of ordinary people? In early eighteenth century Lisbon, Baltasar, a soldier who has lost a hand in battle, falls in love with Blimunda, a young girl with visionary powers. From the day that he follows her home from the auto-da-fe where her mother is condemned and burned at the stake, the two are bound body and soul by a love of unassailable strength. A third party shares their supper that evening: Pardere Bartolemeu Lourenco, whose fantasy is to invent a flying machine. As the inquisition rages and royalty and religion clash, they pursue his impossible, not to mention heretical, dream of flight.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79511 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-20
• Original language: Portuguese
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
"A mighty novel, variously bawdy, elevated, angry and tender, combining erudition, comedy, heresy, surreal science fiction and countless good stories" Robert Farren, Sunday Independent; "Original and brilliant. It is filled with wonder at man's ability to invest and achieve as well as an aversion to the oppression of state faith... Lovers of Marquez and magical realism will be enchanted by the wonder of this novel, for the colour and vivacity of Saramago's imagination inspires and entertains" Kate Figes, Sunday Times

About the Author
Jose Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922 and has been a full time writer since 1979. His work embraces plays, poetry, short stories, non-fiction and several novels and has been translated into more than twenty languages. He has long been regarded as Portugal's most influential living writer for his novels, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and most recently, Blindness. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Customer Reviews

Experience Portugal for under a tenner!
I bought this book, which is magical in all senses, while on a weekend break in Lisbon; and more than any other of Saramago's books, it captures the mood of that remarkable city - the breeze off the sea; the ever-present awareness of successive layers of history; the very Portuguese bittersweet emotion they call "saudade". It is a highly unconventional love story set in and around early eighteenth century Lisbon, featuring one-handed ex-soldier Baltasar and his lover Blimunda, a girl with the unsettling ability to see inside people, not in the sense of mind-reading, but like a CT scanner... When the couple get in cahoots with a visionary but unreliable heretic priest to construct a flying machine powered by human souls, they quickly attract the attention of the Inquisition, with inevitable results.

Add into this brew the building of a massive new monastery and cathedral by the young King of Portugal in honour of a pledge to a saint, and a visit by the composer Scarlatti, and there is enough material for a truly remarkable book. Saramago poignantly captures the powerlessness of individuals against the might of the church and the state (twelve men struggle for weeks to drag an enormous stone slab by ox-team from the quarry to the site of the new monastery; one man is crushed to death; ten years later, the slab forms the quite unnoticed base for just one of the edifice's many balconies), but at the same time he gives us a powerful vision of the survival of the human spirit (and particularly of human love) against the odds.

Although Saramago's use of language is idiosyncratic as always (short on punctuation and full of earthy colloquialisms, with frequent ironic "asides" from the author), Giovanni Pontiero has done a sterling job on the translation, which flows very naturally. This book is altogether a delight.

Everything in life is contained herein
I've literally just finished reading this, and I'm straight on the net to find more about this remarkable author. What a book, full of life and wisdom and beauty and truth and heresy, lots of heresy, and satire and irony and more wisdom and home spun philosophy (all the better for it) and humour and surrealism, but with a backbone of deeply felt humanism and an essential spirituality (though clearly non-denominational) and everything, absolutely everything in human experience is here. Jose Saramago clearly shares a long term view of human existence with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a rare gift for stories, and a world class ability to evoke sympathy for his unique characters. He won a Nobel Prize for a very good reason - truly sublime writing.

A journey into history, magic and language.
This is not so much a love story as a fantastical journey through language. Saramago is often praised for his ideas, but people forget to mention what is most striking and astonishing about him, and this is his command of language and vocabulary. Of course some of this might be lost in the translation into English (most of his books are originally written in Portuguese), but it will still leave the reader short of breath. "The building of the convent" as it could freely be translated from its original title, tells us how the decission to construct a convent by the King of Portugal radically changes the lives of generations of medieval Portuguese people, in the times when moving a single rock meant using animals and even humans in a slow and tremendous process. In the tumult we find love and science taking very surprising and magical turns. A classic from a well deserved Nobel Price winner!