by José Saramago · Tapa dura · ISBN 9789726115601
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«Memorial do Convento» is the historical novel by José Saramago, originally published in 1982 by Editorial Caminho in Portuguese, with 256 pages.
In 18th-century Lisbon, Baltasar, a one-handed soldier, meets Blimunda, a woman with visions. A love story develops between them while King John V has the convent of Mafra built and Father Bartolomeu Lourenço tries to fly with a machine. The novel interweaves royal ambition, faith and the lives of those who built the work.
The novel won the Prémio Literário Município de Lisboa (1982) and the Prémio PEN Clube Português da Novelística (1983). Its author received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.
For readers of historical fiction, magical realism and Portuguese literature, and for those approaching Saramago for the first time.
José de Sousa Saramago was a Portuguese writer. He was the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant."
