Portuguese novelist José Saramago, 75, is
surely Europe's leading candidate for the title
of least-known living Great Writer. His dense,
fabulist explorations of the relationship -- or
lack of one -- between what we call history
and what we call real life are steeped in the
loquacious, old-fashioned modernism of
Proust, Borges and Nabokov. They don't
exactly make for beach reading. Nonetheless,
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
(published in Portugal in 1989 and only now
reaching the U.S. in an elegant translation by
Giovanni Pontiero) is a flat-out wonderful
book, jam-packed with engrossing detail,
rapturous prose, dry insight into our hopeless
quest to recover and understand the past, and
a generous, warmly imaginative understanding
of human desire and loneliness.
The novel uncoils itself, snakelike, on at least
three different levels: There is the tale of an
unlikely love affair between a proofreader and
his superior in contemporary Lisbon; an
unorthodox retelling of events surrounding the
actual siege of Lisbon in 1147, which itself
resolves into an unlikely love affair between a
common soldier and a knight's concubine; and
the airborne, ubiquitous narrative voice,
everywhere and nowhere in the grandest
authorial tradition, frequently pausing to
discuss how proofreaders could save the
world if they were not bound by a monastic
code of conduct, or to wonder whether sexual
pleasure was experienced differently in the
Middle Ages. Saramago's own love affair is
with language, but not as an abstract, artificial
conceit. He clearly marvels at the fact that
language can be used to convey something of
one human being's experience to another.
Many of his tenderly precise descriptions of
the Portuguese capital -- another love of his, it
would seem -- are so beautiful I had to read
them two or three times.
Saramago's humble but appealing hero is
Raimundo Silva, a solitary, middle-aged
proofreader, a "thin, serious man with
badly-dyed hair, as sad as a dog without a
master," in his own words. Silva literally
creates his own destiny with a single, almost
arbitrary, stroke. He inserts an intentional
error into a historical text he is proofreading
(naturally enough, it's called "The History of
the Siege of Lisbon"), so that the book now
claims that 12th century crusaders on their
way to the Holy Land did not stop to help
Dom Afonso Henriques, the Catholic king of
Portugal, take the city of Lisbon from the
Moors who had held it for several centuries.
The error is detected in due course, and Silva
is rebuked by his employer. But his tiny act of
rebellion -- against the fiction of historical
certainty, perhaps, or against his own
inhibited, circumscribed life -- initiates a chain
of marvelous consequences.
Silva stops dyeing his hair, begins writing his
alternative history of the siege of Lisbon (the
same one we have been reading all along) and,
with all the awkwardness and uncertainty of a
teenager, falls in love with the woman
assigned by his publisher to supervise him
after his egregious "mistake." When the two
eventually make love, as the echoes of an
8-century-old battle seem to clamor around
them, the result is perhaps the finest literary
sex scene I have ever read -- erotic,
restrained, resolutely unflowery -- a fitting
capstone to an unforgettable novel that
brushes close to the rank of masterpiece. -- Salon
A brilliantly amusing metafiction about the instability of history and the reality assumed by fiction, from the acclaimed Portuguese author (The Stone Raft). This time, Saramago tells the story of a publisher's proofreader, Raimundo Silva, a middle-aged solitary who has no life apart from his work—until his absorption in a complex historical work (about the siege of Lisbon) is derailed by a sudden, inexplicable action. Raimundo changes a single word in this text, the consequence being that it now asserts (incorrectly) that the Crusaders did not aid the 12th-century Portuguese King Alfonso in reclaiming his capital city from its Moorish occupiers. Raimundo's 'insolent disregard for sound historical facts' inevitably outrages his employers, but piques the curiosity of his new editor, Maria Sara, who suggests he write a novel developing the possibilities inherent in the alternative history he has thus 'created.' From this point, both Raimundo's novel and Saramago's (which encloses it) assume a dizzying variety of shifting forms: dialogues between author and character(s); quotidian encounters and occurrences that are paralleled by both known history and the proofreaders's romanticized improvement of it; and transpositions of Raimundo and Maria Sara (who becomes his mistress) into the Portuguese hero Mogueime and the stalwart concubine Ouroana. Saramago moves gracefully between the world of the reinvented past and the unheroic realm in which Raimundo's pleasing fantasies are constantly interrupted by hunger pangs and ringing telephones. The novel embraces a dauntingly broad range of references, juxtaposes past and present tense mischievously, and takes the form of elegantlyconvoluted long sentences and paragraphs—which, though they demand intense concentration, never descend to obscurity, thanks to Saramago's lucidity and wit and his superb translator's verbal and syntactical resourcefulness. The best work we've seen yet from a consummate artificer who may well be one of the greatest living novelists.
