The History of the Siege of Lisbon

The History of the Siege of Lisbon PDF Author: José Saramago
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547540345
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
A proofreader realizes his power to edit the truth on a whim, in a “brilliantly original” novel by a Nobel Prize winner (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Raimundo Silva is a middle-aged, celibate clerk, proofing manuscripts for a respectable publishing house. Fluent in Portuguese, he has been assigned to work on a standard history of the country, and the twelfth-century king who laid siege to Lisbon. In a moment of subversive daring, Raimundo decides to change just one single word of text—a capricious revision that completely undoes the past. When discovered, his insolent disregard for facts appalls his employers—save for his new editor, Maria Sara. She suggests that Rainmundo take his transgressions even further. Through Rainmundo and Maria’s eyes, what transpires is an alternate view of history and a colorful reinvention of a debatable truth. It’s a serpentine journey through time where past and present converge, fact becomes myth, and fiction and reality blur—especially for Rainmundo and Maria themselves, who begin to find themselves erotically drawn to each other. “Walter Mitty has nothing on Raimundo Silva . . . this hypnotic tale is a great comic romp through history, language and the imagination.” —Publishers Weekly Translated by Giovanni Pontiero

The History of the Siege of Lisbon

The History of the Siege of Lisbon PDF Author: José Saramago
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547540345
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book

Book Description
A proofreader realizes his power to edit the truth on a whim, in a “brilliantly original” novel by a Nobel Prize winner (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Raimundo Silva is a middle-aged, celibate clerk, proofing manuscripts for a respectable publishing house. Fluent in Portuguese, he has been assigned to work on a standard history of the country, and the twelfth-century king who laid siege to Lisbon. In a moment of subversive daring, Raimundo decides to change just one single word of text—a capricious revision that completely undoes the past. When discovered, his insolent disregard for facts appalls his employers—save for his new editor, Maria Sara. She suggests that Rainmundo take his transgressions even further. Through Rainmundo and Maria’s eyes, what transpires is an alternate view of history and a colorful reinvention of a debatable truth. It’s a serpentine journey through time where past and present converge, fact becomes myth, and fiction and reality blur—especially for Rainmundo and Maria themselves, who begin to find themselves erotically drawn to each other. “Walter Mitty has nothing on Raimundo Silva . . . this hypnotic tale is a great comic romp through history, language and the imagination.” —Publishers Weekly Translated by Giovanni Pontiero

The History of the Siege of Lisbon

The History of the Siege of Lisbon PDF Author: José Saramago
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156006248
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A proofreader in a publishing house changes a word in a manuscript to make a history book read that a 12th Century battle was strictly a Portuguese victory, rather than a joint victory with the Crusaders. Instead of being fired the proofreader is commissioned to develop the idea into a novel. A study in historical revisionism.

Queen of the Sea

Queen of the Sea PDF Author: Barry Hatton
Publisher: Hurst & Company
ISBN: 1849049971
Category : Lisbon (Portugal)
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
A dramatic and intimate portrait of one of the world's great cities.

Conquest of Lisbon

Conquest of Lisbon PDF Author: Raol
Publisher: Records of Western Civilizatio
ISBN: 9780231121231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This eyewitness account of the capture of Lisbon in 1147 by the combined forces of King Alfonso Henriques of Portugal and a fleet of crusaders from the Anglo-Norman realm, Flanders, and the Rhineland is one of the richest and most exciting sources to survive from this period.

Landscapes After the Battle

Landscapes After the Battle PDF Author: Juan Goytisolo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781852421137
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Trapped in his apartment in an immigrant district of Paris, the narrator is far from the high life of museums, elegant restaurants and boutiques. Within this imprisonment, his thoughts oscillate between revolutionary terrorism and pre-pubescent sexuality - a concern he shares with Lewis Carroll. Mirroring the conventions of Arabic texts, Landscapes After the Battle is to be understood from the perspective of its end; an end where the relationship between writer, the reader and the written is revealed as playful and humorous. The appearance of the comic in a novel by Juan Goytisolo is unexpected; like Dracula at a haemophiliacs? convention.

The English Armada

The English Armada PDF Author: Luis Gorrochategui Santos
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350016985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
During the year between July 1588, when the Spanish Armada set sail from Spain and July 1589, when the survivors of the English counterpart of this fleet, the little-known English Armada, reached port in England, two of history's worst naval catastrophes took place. A great deal of attention has been dedicated to the former and precious little to the latter. This book presents a full-scale account of an event which has been neglected for more than four centuries. It reconstructs the military operations day by day for the first time, taking apart the established notion that, with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, England achieved maritime supremacy and the decay of Spain began. This book clearly and in a rigorously documented fashion shows how the defeat of the English Armada counterbalanced that of the Spanish, frustrating England's intention of seizing Philip II's American empire and changing the tide of the war.

The Cave

The Cave PDF Author: José Saramago
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547537980
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
An unassuming family struggles to keep up with the ruthless pace of progress in “a genuinely brilliant novel” from a Nobel Prize winner (Chicago Tribune). A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his daughter Marta and her husband Marçal in a small village on the outskirts of The Center, an imposing complex of shops, apartments, and offices. Marçal works there as a security guard, and Cipriano drives him to work each day before delivering his own humble pots and jugs. On one such trip, he is told not to make any more deliveries. People prefer plastic, apparently. Unwilling to give up his craft, Cipriano tries his hand at making ceramic dolls. Astonishingly, The Center places an order for hundreds, and Cipriano and Marta set to work—until the order is cancelled and the penniless trio must move from the village into The Center. When mysterious sounds of digging emerge from beneath their new apartment, Cipriano and Marçal investigate; what they find transforms the family’s life, in a novel that is both “irrepressibly funny” (The Christian Science Monitor) and a “triumph” (The Washington Post Book World). “The struggle of the individual against bureaucracy and anonymity is one of the great subjects of modern literature, and Saramago is often matched with Kafka as one of its premier exponents. Apt as the comparison is, it doesn’t convey the warmth and rueful human dimension of novels like Blindness and All the Names. Those qualities are particularly evident in his latest brilliant, dark allegory, which links the encroaching sterility of modern life to the parable of Plato’s cave . . . [a] remarkably generous and eloquent novel.” —Publishers Weekly Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

Small Memories

Small Memories PDF Author: José Saramago
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547541546
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
The Nobel Prize–winning author of Blindness recalls the days of his youth in Lisbon and the Portuguese countryside in this charming memoir. José Saramago was eighteen months old when he moved from the village of Azinhaga with his father and mother to live in Lisbon. But he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence to stay with his maternal grandparents, illiterate peasants in the eyes of the outside world, but a fount of knowledge, affection, and authority to young José. Small Memories traces the formation of a man who emerged, against all odds, as one of the world’s most respected writers. Shifting between childhood and his teenage years, between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this mosaic of memories looks back into the author’s boyhood: the tragic death of his older brother at the age of four; his mother pawning the family’s blankets every spring and buying them back in time for winter; his grandparents bringing the weaker piglets into their bed on cold nights; and Saramago’s early encounters with literature, from teaching himself to read to poring over a Portuguese-French conversation guide, not realizing that he was in fact reading a play by Molière.

Skylight

Skylight PDF Author: José Saramago
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544084985
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The denizens of a rundown building in 1940s Lisbon come to sparkling life in this lost early novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Blindness. The renowned Portuguese author Jose Saramago was at the beginning of his career when he submitted his novel Skylight for publication in 1953. It then sat lost among stacks of manuscripts for thirty-six years. Published posthumously according to Saramago’s wishes, the world can finally enjoy this “fascinating and startlingly mature work” set in 1940’s Lisbon (Boston Globe). The inhabitants of a faded apartment building are struggling to make ends meet: Silvio the cobbler and his wife take in a disaffected young lodger; Dona Lídia, a retired prostitute, is kept by a businessman with a roving eye. Humble salesman Emilio’s Spanish wife is in a permanent rage; beautiful Claudinha’s boss lusts for her; Justina and her womanizer husband live at war with each other. Happy marriages, abusive relationships, jealousy, gossip, love—Skylight is a portrait of ordinary people painted by the master of the quotidian, a great observer of the immense beauty and profound hardship of the modern world. “There is no shortage of wonders to be found in [Skylight].” —Washington Post

The Stone Raft

The Stone Raft PDF Author: José Saramago
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547545312
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
A “marvelously amusing” political fable in which part of the European continent breaks off and drifts away on its own (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A Nobel Prize winner who has been called “the García Márquez of Portugal” (New Statesman) chronicles world events on a human scale in this exhilarating allegorical novel. One day, quite inexplicably, the Iberian Peninsula simply breaks free from the European continent and begins to drift as if it were a sort of stone raft. Panic ensues as residents and tourists attempt to escape, while crowds gather on cliffs to watch the newly formed island sail off into the sea. Meanwhile, five people on the island are drawn together—first by a string of surreal events and then by love. Taking to the road to explore the limits of their now finite land, they find themselves adrift in a world made new by this radical shift in perspective. As bureaucrats ponder what to do about their unusual predicament, the intertwined lives of these five strangers are clarified and forever changed by a physical, spiritual, and sexual voyage to an unknown destination. At once an epic adventure and a profound fable about the state of the European project, The Stone Raft is a “hauntingly lyrical narrative with political, social, and moral underpinnings” (Booklist) that “may be Saramago’s finest work” (Los Angeles Times). Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero