Product Description

In this ingenious novel (New York Times) by one of Europes most original and remarkable writers (Los Angeles Times), a proofreaders deliberate slip opens the door to romance-and confounds the facts of Portugals past. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #179929 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-01
• Released on: 2001-01-12
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .79" h x 5.37" w x 8.01" l, .69 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 324 pages

From Amazon.com
"If proofreaders were given their freedom and did not have their hands and feet tied by a mass of prohibitions more binding than the penal code, they would soon transform the face of the world, establish the kingdom of universal happiness, giving drink to the thirsty, food to the famished, peace to those who live in turmoil, joy to the sorrowful ... for they would be able to do all these things simply by changing the words ..." The power of the word is evident in Portuguese author José Saramago's novel, The History of the Siege of Lisbon. His protagonist, a proofreader named Raimundo Silva, adds a key word to a history of Portugal and thus rewrites not only the past, but also his own life.

Brilliantly translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero, The History of the Siege of Lisbon is a meditation on the differences between historiography, historical fiction, and "stories inserted into history." The novel is really two stories in one: the reimagined history of the 1147 siege of Lisbon that Raimundo feels compelled to write and the story of Raimundo's life, including his unexpected love affair with the editor, Maria Sara. In Saramago's masterful hands, the strands of this complex tale weave together to create a satisfying whole.

From Library Journal
Portuguese novelist Saramago (The Stone Raft, LJ 2/15/95) is fascinated by how history, often constructed from the slightest shreds, fails to acknowledge the reality of unavailable evidence. When proofreader Raimundo Silva dares to falsify a statement in a history text?namely, that Galician warriors conquered Lisbon from the Moors in 1147 without the help of returning Crusaders?instead of losing his job, he gains the respect of his supervisor and begins an affair with her. She encourages him to recast the event as a novel. Soon he is rooting for a Moor over the Archbishop of Braga and suspecting that there is more Moorish than Aryan Christian blood in the modern Portuguese nation. With its paragraph-long sentences and page-long paragraphs, this panoramic tale of daring and timidity challenges readers to consider the sprawling no man's land where fiction and history merge.?Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Raimundo Silva, proofreader for a Portuguese publishing house, violates the fundamental ethic of his profession by adding the word not to a sentence in a history textbook, so it reads that in 1147 the king of Portugal reconquered Lisbon from the Saracens without any help from the Crusaders. Although the change is caught, and an errata slip added to the book, Silva's supervisor, rather than firing him, asks him to write an alternative history based on his emendation of the text. Like the novels of his soulmates, Rushdie and Garcia M rquez, Saramago's novel is challenging both linguistically and thematically. Sentences snake on for whole paragraphs, the dialogue lacks quotation marks, and the reader moves from the twelfth century to the present and back again, from real event to imagined past. Saramago raises provocative questions about the nature of history and language. Serious readers willing to devote the time the book deserves will be dazzled by Saramago's inventiveness, intelligence, and wit. Offered in a superb translation, it is not to be missed. Nancy Pearl