Baltasar and Blimunda (Picador Books)

Padmadaka, Padmaloka Buddhist Retreat Centre.


Experience Portugal for under a tenner!   March 8, 2004
Dr. Kenneth W. Douglas (Glasgow)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

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   June 25, 2003
owen (London)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

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.