"If proofreaders were given their freedom and did not have their hands and feet tied by a mass of prohibitions more binding than the penal code, they would soon transform the face of the world, establish the kingdom of universal happiness, giving drink to the thirsty, food to the famished, peace to those who live in turmoil, joy to the sorrowful ... for they would be able to do all these things simply by changing the words ..." The power of the word is evident in Portuguese author José Saramago's novel, The History of the Siege of Lisbon. His protagonist, a proofreader named Raimundo Silva, adds a key word to a history of Portugal and thus rewrites not only the past, but also his own life. Brilliantly translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero, The History of the Siege of Lisbon is a meditation on the differences between historiography, historical fiction, and "stories inserted into history." The novel is really two stories in one: the reimagined history of the 1147 siege of Lisbon that Raimundo feels compelled to write and the story of Raimundo's life, including his unexpected love affair with the editor, Maria Sara. In Saramago's masterful hands, the strands of this complex tale weave together to create a satisfying whole.


From Library Journal
Portuguese novelist Saramago (The Stone Raft, LJ 2/15/95) is fascinated by how history, often constructed from the slightest shreds, fails to acknowledge the reality of unavailable evidence. When proofreader Raimundo Silva dares to falsify a statement in a history text?namely, that Galician warriors conquered Lisbon from the Moors in 1147 without the help of returning Crusaders?instead of losing his job, he gains the respect of his supervisor and begins an affair with her. She encourages him to recast the event as a novel. Soon he is rooting for a Moor over the Archbishop of Braga and suspecting that there is more Moorish than Aryan Christian blood in the modern Portuguese nation. With its paragraph-long sentences and page-long paragraphs, this panoramic tale of daring and timidity challenges readers to consider the sprawling no man's land where fiction and history merge.?Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Edmund White
I found the verbal pierce and parry of the two proofreaders' courtship the most persuasive and vivid aspect of the novel. Saramago has a sure sense of the pleasurable danger of seduction, the fear of offending, the wild hope of wooing ...


The New York Times
Cryptic and ingenious.


Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The brilliantly original achievement of Siege is the comical, hesitant, and powerfully erotic progress of the couple's mutual courtship. . . . Saramago is one of Europe's most original and remarkable writers. His writing is imbued with a spirit of comic inquiry, meditative pessimism and a quietly transforming energy that turns the indefinite into the unforgettable."


From Booklist
Raimundo Silva, proofreader for a Portuguese publishing house, violates the fundamental ethic of his profession by adding the word not to a sentence in a history textbook, so it reads that in 1147 the king of Portugal reconquered Lisbon from the Saracens without any help from the Crusaders. Although the change is caught, and an errata slip added to the book, Silva's supervisor, rather than firing him, asks him to write an alternative history based on his emendation of the text. Like the novels of his soulmates, Rushdie and Garcia M rquez, Saramago's novel is challenging both linguistically and thematically. Sentences snake on for whole paragraphs, the dialogue lacks quotation marks, and the reader moves from the twelfth century to the present and back again, from real event to imagined past. Saramago raises provocative questions about the nature of history and language. Serious readers willing to devote the time the book deserves will be dazzled by Saramago's inventiveness, intelligence, and wit. Offered in a superb translation, it is not to be missed. Nancy Pearl


From Kirkus Reviews
A brilliantly amusing metafiction about the instability of history and the reality assumed by fiction, from the acclaimed Portuguese author (The Stone Raft, 1995, etc.). 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 elegantly convoluted 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. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Publishers Weekly
"This hypnotic tale is a great comic romp through history, language and the imagination."


Book Description
In this “ingenious” novel (New York Times) by “one of Europe’s most original and remarkable writers” (Los Angeles Times), a proofreader’s deliberate slip opens the door to romance-and confounds the facts of Portugal’s past. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.



Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Portugese

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Raimundo Silva, a proofreader at a Portuguese publishing house, takes it upon himself to alter a key word in a text to make it read that in 1147 the king of Portugal reconquered Lisbon from the Saracens without any assistance from the Crusaders. His revision of a signal episode in Portuguese history unexpectedly and inexplicably wins the heart of his supervisor, Maria Sara, a woman of unwavering conviction. Rather than fire him as she ought to, Maria encourages Raimundo to rewrite the history of the siege of Lisbon in the grand style of a historical romance. Around this seemingly minor episode Jose Saramago constructs a broad, multifaceted tableau involving meditations on historiography and the uses and abuses of language, a parable of life under authoritarian rule, and a bittersweet romance.

FROM THE CRITICS

Andrew O'Hehir

Portuguese novelist Jos￯﾿ﾽ 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

Kirkus Reviews

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.