The History of the Siege of Lisbon

If you can handle a reworking of the concept of 'punctuation' as we know it, Saramago's History of the Siege of Lisbon is well worth reading. It's not easy, by any stretch of the imagination: dialogue becomes a single block of text, single paragraphs go on for pages with no breaks and often without a period, and the whole concept of 'run-on sentence' is mostly ignored.But it adds an incredible flow to this book. Based on a fairly simple premise--adding a single word to a history to change the entire course of the story--the book rises above plot, due in large part to the aforementioned style. Once you get used to it, the dialogue feels completely natural, not forced at all, and the sub-story of love between the proofreader and his editor falls into place perfectly. The characters are well developed to a fault, and by the end of the novel, you feel like you know them on a personal basis.And it's got a two-page discussion of the beauty of toast. How can you not be fascinated? ("...it is so perfect and crunchy golden brown that one thinks one could go without the butter entirely, but you'd be a fool, only a fool would forego the butter...")Overall, it took me a solid two weeks to finish this book, but it was worth my time: I completely understand why Saramago won the Nobel Prize.

Raimundo Silva, 50+,is a proofreader living alone in the oldest part of Lisbon. The publishing house he works for has trusted his corrections to many of their texts for years, yet one day on impulse he decides to alter a book, "The History of the Siege of Lisbon", by inserting a word of his own. Where the author writes that the crusaders on their way to the Holy Land stayed to help the Portugese conquer the city of Lisbon and drive out the Muslims, Raimundo inserts the word "not" saying the crusaders did not help the Portugese changing the whole meaning of what the author had written. His employers are embarrassed when the book makes it to publication and Raimundo is reprimanded, made to write a letter of apology and told he'll be reporting to a new boss, a woman, responsible for checking all his corrections. His new boss and lover to be, Maria Sara convinces him to re-write the history of Lisbon with the word "not", and as he reimagines the siege of Lisbon, he reimagines his own life and falls in love for the first time. Slow moving, philosophical, this is a romantic & sensual love story, especially for mature readers as well as being great historical fiction. This book was my introduction to Portugese history some years ago.Saramago's style is challenging as usual, single paragraphs that go on for 2 pages, sentences that meander for half a page, whole conversations in a single sentence. Personally I find his way of writing fluid and beautiful, like being right inside the character's head flowing along with his thoughts. He certainly deserved to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

this book was one of the surprises of 1999. I was intrigued by the title since I am a history buff, and impressed by the fact that Jose saragmago had won the Nobel prize for Literature. I had never even heard of him. The book was a total delight, in both the language and the idea it presented--how a proofreader, by altering a single word, can devastate a book and completely alter its meaning. The proofreader in question, a middle-aged quasi failure in his profession conceives a daring idea how to gain attention, and he follows through with his plan, with the expected results. The wit and deftness of the author are apparent from the beginning, and the development midstream is totally unexpected. I highly recommend this book to anyone with a literary bent and a taste for the bizarre.

I'm not one of those people who throws around words like brilliant and genius. But.Saramago seems to me to have created a new form of writing here. The language is astonishing, exhilarating, its twists and turns some kind of sorcerer's spell. A mischievous, laughing conjurer of irony. His frequent asides to the reader, abashed corrections of his own turns of phrase--I don't know, maybe this turns off some people, but it drew me ever further into the labyrinthine and quite sly workings of the narrative. Saramago is doing something unprecedented here. I'd say he's reinvented the English language itself--but then I remember that the novel was written in Portuguese and the translation I read probably provided only a shadow of the glee that explodes from the original.I can't believe some readers seem to have found the book repetitive or silly or boring. For me it opened new vistas and showed that a literary genius can still create something miraculous and new.The day after I started reading the book, it was announced that Saramago had won the Nobel Prize. Then I learned that he is a leading Portuguese communist, and that made me even happier. Then the Vatican issued a stinging denunciation of the Nobel committee for giving the prize to an atheist. Saramago held a news conference and said he'd sooner give up the prize than renounce his atheism. So not only is he an innovator on a par with the greatest artists--but he's one of us, a worker, one of the few remaining artists who refuses to sell out, renounce his class, or let bourgeois norms dictate his art. Reading The History of the Siege of Lisbon was like drinking down a bracing antidote to the deadly dreck that usually passes for literature.