Of feeling at a time when the idea of individuality has begun to stir European consciousness. What excites his imagination is the conflict between a stiff moralism of morals, manners and speech - those social and ecclesiastic rituals denoting the death of spirit - and a free play
Saramago often reveals a bracing contempt for the powerful of this world, he is not primarilyĬoncerned with the struggle between classes. This full-bodied novel is organized as a series of contrasts between rulers and ruled, those who luxuriate and those who labor. All the while a self-conscious narrator keeps breaking in with jokes, aphorisms, a scale of ironies and critical observations (''AfterĪll,'' he explains, ''this is a fairy tale''). Saramago spins a love story, as sober as it is exalted, about two young plebeians bound in absolute devotion. And then, as still another narrative strand, Mr.
The realistic pages is a fable about a flight into the marvelous, a lyric fantasy about a company of free spirits escaping for a moment into freedom. It is a work of harsh realism, picturing the abominations of absolute power and Inquisitorial fanaticism but weaving around Set in early 18th-century Portugal, ''Baltasar and Blimunda'' knits together a number of fictional modes. This injustice should speedily beĬorrected with Giovanni Pontiero's translation, at once idiomatic and elegant, of ''Baltasar and Blimunda.'' And apart from its strong intrinsic interest, this novel should help put to rest the notion recentlyĮxpressed in these and other pages that living in the wake of the heroic period of literary modernism dooms us to a literature of timid voices and small consequence. Trend, there has now arrived from Portugal a brilliant novel by Jose Saramago, a writer who is highly regarded in Portuguese-speaking countries but little known elsewhere.
THE most vigorous writing of recent years has come not from the great powers of the West but from small, impoverished and sometimes ''backward'' countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe and parts of Africa. Section 7, Column 1 Book Review Deskīy IRVING HOWE Irving Howe's most recent books are ''The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson'' and ''The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse,'' of which he is co-editor.īy Jose Saramago. November 1, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
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