Customer Reviews

The History of the Siege of Lisbon

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This is a beautiful book and I am surprised at the poor reviews here. What a wonderful way with language Saramago has! A book that is, in its very essence, a reflection on language and writing. Its cast of characters include a proofreader, books that have been written, the narrator (is he then the ultimate writer?) and of course we, the readers who, through Saramago's genius, become an intimate part of the novel. And what a brilliant idea that history can be revised by changing the way it is written! Could one perhaps conclude then that the exquisite love affair between the proofreader and the woman at the publishing house is really a love affair between the author and the reader?

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.

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.

A man no longer needs a woman. He has his work. And he has the prostitutes downtown. He is too old. He is too conservative. He is content to live his life through the books he proofreads.

In a process of professional malpractice he alters history and encounters a love he never expected.

In 'The History of the Seige of Lisbon,' Saramago has created an epic love story. Where many love stories stumble over cliches of plot and word, 'The History' is about the emotions, confusions, and distractions of new love: the angst of imagining our objet with another, the pain of waiting for the phone to ring, and the primal need to distract ourselves from obsessing on our own vices and virtues.

Conventional prose fails to capture these emotions. Saramago give us something else.

Saramago reveals the intimacy of all our relationships --with others, with places, and with history. His description of Lisbon isn't that of a travel guide but of an intimate. His retelling of the crusader's seige of Lisbon shows the patience and care of a father rather than the reserved impartiality of an academic.

Not since Mordecai Richler's 'Barney's Version' have I read such a brilliant story that reveals a love for person, place, and time.

saramago's odd use of punctuation, especially for dialog, is indeed difficult to get used to. he forces us to think differently about how words fit and form, and the power of alteration.

at the core is the sweet, furtive love story of a quiet middle-aged proof reader and his immediate superior, who has been assigned to oversee his work and prevent further alterations of history. beautifully erotic in places, this work is for the patient reader and may take some time to read and re-read.

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.

Readers of Saramago will recognize the protagonist of this disarmingly charming novel from his other work: a reclusive, shy, bachelor who works in a Kafkaesque world as an unseen, undistinguished clerk and who, one day, inexplicably does something that shatters the routine and frees him from the daily grind. In this story, Raimundo Silva is a proofreader and his act of rebellion is to insert a single word --"not"--into the manuscript on the history of the siege of Lisbon. Upon publication, the book states (incorrectly) that foreign crusaders did not help the Portuguese with the 12th-century siege that wrested Lisbon from the Moors.

From such seemingly trite and random events emanate massive life changes (and subversive comedies). When his publisher discovers the embarrassing and costly error, they hire a new boss to oversee the proofreaders. Instead of mistrusting her new charge, however, she is intrigued by his inexplicable act of subversiveness, and she subtly (well, not that subtly) recommends that he write his own book, an entry in the genre of alternative history: what would have happened if the Crusaders had indeed turned down King Afonso's request for aid? Silva takes up the challenge, and the remainder of the Saramago's novel alternates (often within the same sentence) between Silva's imaginary book and his subsequent life in Lisbon.

At the most obvious level, Saramago is commenting on the tension between historiography and history, between fiction and veracity. Furthermore, there are many parallels--in themes, in characters, in style, in plot--between this book and Saramago's later novel, "All the Names." And, as always, the author's snakelike, page-long sentences demand much from the reader even as they offer insight, beauty, wit, and comedy.

What's unexpected here, however, is the depth of the twin love stories that develop in both the novel and the novel-within-the-novel. "I don't know how people loved at that time," confesses Silva to his own new love about the challenge of writing his book. Her advice: "Invent a love story without any amorous words, . . . assuming such a thing is possible." But his confession and her response are not only about the historical work at hand; they also serve as veiled remarks about the couple's own nascent relationship. In addition to questioning the very nature of how we conceive and recall history, Saramago's novel teases out the human passions behind the parade of names and events selected for the official versions in the chronicles.

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.

It is not exactly a fetching title for a work of fiction!
It sounds like... well, a history book, does it not?
And in a sense, it is a history book, but one that basically, from start to finish, speculates upon what exactly a book of "history" is! It questions the nature of history and the relationship of words to truth and reality.
Much like another favorite author of mine [Ian McEwan], Saramago's fiction capitalizes on the effects of seemingly innocuous antecedent causes. He has the uncanny ability of constructing looming fictional mountains from the most shadowless of molehills.
In Siege of Lisbon, he is writing at the height of his powers.

Our protagonist is Raimundo Silva, a middle-aged, quiet, [somewhat] celibate bachelor, well-respected for his years of accuracy as proof-reader for a well-known publishing house.
One day, while proof-reading a standard text of the history of the siege of Lisbon, Raimundo inexplicably succumbs to an urge to insert one word in the concluding portions of the text.
This word "not" [the most shadowless of molehills] amounts to a sort of re-invention of the founding myth of Portugal. As amended by Silva, the text now reads that the crusaders did not come to the aid of the 12th-century Portuguese King who was laying siege to Lisbon, aiming to expel the Moors from the area.

Silva submits his bastardized work and then lives twelve full days of angst-riddled guilt, pending discovery and punishment, both of which duly arrive in the form of a pre-judged tribunal, with Raimundo in the dock!
He is acquitted of his offense, but put on probation. And to deal with any further lapses in proof-reading efficiency, the publisher has hired a new executive. The young, voluptuous, alluring and astute Maria Sara, to whom Raimundo will be obligated to report.
Rather than being reproachful, Maria is fascinated with Raimundo's anarchic ways.
In a private meeting, she proposes that he write his own version of the siege of Lisbon... the version which would elaborate upon his insertion of the word "not." Initially, he feels unequal to the task, but soon becomes equally obsessed with the idea, and sets out upon his assignment.

But this is not the only obsession now alive in Raimundo. Along with the project, he is also obsessed with Maria, and she, with him.
What follows in the book before us is an amazing intertwining of history with fiction.
As in, it happens not only in the book that is in our own hands, but also in the one that Raimundo is writing, for he creates a love story within his fictionalized "history" that mirrors his own burgeoning relationship with Maria.

What we hold in our hands is:
a) a contemporary love story, set in modern-day Lisbon.
b) an unorthodox "Raimundo-ized" retelling of events surrounding the actual siege of Lisbon in 1147, which itself resolves into a believable love affair between a common soldier and a knight's concubine.
c) a wonderfully rich and rewarding Saramagian discourse on the mutability of history, and the inadequacy of words to describe what is [too often] perceived as fact.

This being the eighth Saramago novel I have read, it saddens me to think there is only one left for me to read through for the first time. [The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis]. The thing about Jose Saramago is that each novel is so good, that while you are reading it, you feel a loyalty to claiming that it is his best work. I felt that way repeatedly during the reading of The History of the Siege of Lisbon.

Sentences and passages run off into the horizon like an endlessly rolling landscape. His use of punctuation is completely not normal. Some of his sentences go on for pages at a time, spliced together with a sand-on-the-seashore amount of commas. Within sentences, new speakers speak, with no use of quotation marks differentiating one from the other.
If Saramago submitted to any sort of standardized Grammar Test [something I cannot imagine him doing...] any teacher would have to fail him. Then, were that same teacher to read something by Saramago, she would find that the old man has much to teach her, about grammar.

Such unconventionality extends even to the narration. In Saramago, the narrator must be listed as a principle character so absorbingly digressive and ubiquitously intercalary that he is nowhere non-evident, often stumbling forward to inform the reader that there are certain things that even he cannot possibly know, and hence, in humble non-omniscience, he must remain silent upon these issues!
In a word, if you have not experienced the work of Jose Saramago, I greatly encourage you to dive in. And The History of the Siege of Lisbon seems to me as good a place as any, to begin.

When I started reading this book, all I knew about Saramago was that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature; so I did not know what to expect. Although the publisher compares him to Borges, Rushdie, and Garcia Marquez, what we have in the man from Portugal is a true native original.

We are introduced to the dusty world of a professional proofreader -- a fussy type who regrets having two gerunds in his name. I felt as if I were propelled into MOLLOY or some other of Beckett's novels as the beginning spiralled around this seemingly unlikely character.

Suddenly, everything changes. At a critical juncture in a history of the siege of Lisbon he is proofreading, Silva suddenly introduces a caret and adds the word "not" -- thus completely changing the history.

His new boss, a Dr Maria Sara is enchanted by this Bartleby-like act of negation. She challenges Silva to write a "what if" novel on the supposition that the history occurred as modified by the "not": that the Crusaders, instead of helping the King of Portugal defeat the Moors, actually sailed on to the Holy Land directly.

Meanwhile, Silva is clearly becoming enchanted with Maria Sara. What ensues is both the strangest and most convincing of love stories. Silva writes his book, brings us into the thick of the history as he imagines the various characters from the blind muezzin to the German knight to the king himself. All along, he and Maria are romancing each other through the events of the siege.

What an incredible ride! Saramago is a master at easing from one world into another and taking us with him. He is both a master story-teller and an authentic modern in his handling of a character's state of mind -- a writer who easily could hold his own in the company of the great writers of our time.