“O amor é o fim do cerco.”

Hacía tiempo que no leía un libro tan maravilloso.

194.tHistória do Cerco de Lisboa = The history of the siege of Lisbon, José Saramago
The History of the Siege of Lisbon is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago, first published in 1989. Raimundo Silva, assigned to correct a book entitled "The History of Siege of Lisbon" by his publishing house, decides to alter the meaning of a crucial sentence by inserting the word "not" in the text, so that the book now claims that the Crusaders did not come to the aid of the Portuguese king in taking Lisbon from the Moors. This has repercussions both for himself and for the historical profession. The second plot is Saramago's simultaneous recounting of the siege in the style of a historical romance.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز پنجم ماه آگوست سال 2012 میلادی
عنوان: تاریخ محاصره لیسبون؛ نویسنده: خوزه (ژوزه) ساراماگو، مترجم: عباس پژمان؛ تهران، نشر مرکز؛ 1380، در دوازده و 444 ص؛ شابک: 9643056287‬؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان پرتقالی - سده 20 م
عنوان: تاریخ محاصره لیسبون؛ نویسنده: خوزه (ژوزه) ساراماگو، مترجم: کیومرث پارسای؛ تهران، علم؛ 1384، در 436 ص؛ شابک: 644055462؛
رمان تاریخی ـ عاشقانه «تاریخ محاصره لیسبون» داستان محاصره ی شهر لیسبون، توسط پرتغالیها در سده ی دوازده میلادی ست، شهر چهار سده در دست مسلمانان مغربی بوده، که پس از چند ماه سقوط میکند، روایتی عاشقانه نیز، (برگرفته از داستان زندگی نویسنده و همسرش) همراه داستان است. ا. شربیانی

Encontrei na escrita o cunho de Saramago, mas não a superioridade habitual das personagens.
Escrito em dois planos temporais perfeitamente interligados, o livro reescreve a história do cerco de Lisboa e, simultaneamente, dá-nos a conhecer as personagens atuais num enredo que mistura História e ficção.
Sem grande força ou carisma e com um desenrolar calculável, reinventa um novo cerco para um mesmo desfecho.
Ainda assim, vale sempre a pena ler Saramago e admirar a sua arte de escrever como quem conta histórias à lareira, repletas de satírico bom humor e a fineza do costume.

The story of Raimundo Silva, a proofreader, who acts on an impulse and by adding a “no” changes the content of a book and his life too.

Same long phrases, same existential questions, same irony and humor between the lines. Really missed his style.

★★★★☆/★★★★★

في كل مرة تفتح كتابا لساراماجو فأنت تعطيه الإذن بالدخول إلى دماغك ليعبث بها كيفما شاء .. يغادرك بعد أن تنهي الكتاب ويترك لك الفوضى داخل عقلك لتلملمها كيفما شئت بعد ذلك

هــذه الرواية عن قوة الكلمة .. عن مصير تغيره كلمة واحدة .. عن رايموندو سيلبا الذي تملكته روح قوية ليعيث في تاريخ حصار لشبونة مايعيث من تغيير للأحداث لتجعله هذه "اللا" التي تسللت بين السطور لأن كلمة "نعم" ببساطة لا تقنعه يلتقي بماريا ساره التي تبعث الروح في حياته بعد سنين من الملل
والروتين سكنت التشققات العفنة لمنزله وروحه

هــــذه الرواية عن ماذا لو كان كل ما تعرفه عن التاريخ خاطيء؟؟ ماذا لو
لم تحصل الأمور كما قالوا لك؟؟ أو كما قرأت؟؟ أو كما شاهدت؟؟

كعادته ساراماجو يتركك في الضوء الباهر لتقوم بأقلمة عقلك وعينيك وذاتك
لتجعل المنطق حكما على أغلب ما تفكر وتقرأ وتشاهد

هــــذا مغزى القصة .. فماذا عن الأسلوب الروائي؟؟
===============================================

هنا ستجد بطلا عاديا من أبطال ساراماجو وحيدا يروي حياته راوياً رائعاً
ستنتهي من الرواية لتجد أن شخصيتك المفضلة في هذه الرواية ليست هي البطل
الذي يدفعك ساراماجو دفعاً للتعاطف معه .. بل ستكتشف أن الراوي الساخر الذي
يدس تعليقاته الساخرة على الأحداث وفلسفته في الحياة بين السطور هو
شخصيتك المفضلة لأنك ببساطة علقت مع راوٍ متمرد لا يظن أن وظيفته تقتصر على السرد فقط

خلال هذا السرد لحياة رايموندو سيلبا وقصة الحصار ستكتشف أن ساراماجو يمتلك
آلة السفر عبر الزمن فهو ينتقل عبر تسعة قرون بكل سهولة ويسر ولا يضن عليك بذلك بل يصطحبك معه بكل رحابة صدر ليتركك في لشبونة لبضعة أشهر في لشبونة التي يرتفع بها صوت الآذان يرجعك بعدها إلى مكتب سيلبا ثم إلى منزلك بعد
أن تغلق كتابك وتعرف أنك لن تنظر إلى شيء مثلما كنت تنظر إليه من قبل .. ببساطة لأنك لم تعــــد ذاتـــك

I'd previously read his excellent novel Blindness, but this was even better, both more human and more high-concept. It's a deceptively simple novel, centering around Raimundo Silva, a middle-aged proofreader in modern-day Lisbon who, when given a book called The History of the Siege of Lisbon to proof, impulsively inserts the single word "not" into a crucial sentence about the decision of a Crusader army to come to the aid of an army of Galicians besieging the city of Lisbon during the Reconquista. When his crime is discovered, he's called into his head office and chastised, but allowed to keep his job. His new supervisor is an attractive older woman named Maria Sara who takes a liking to him and suggests that he write an alternate history exploring how the Galicians, who were the founders on the Portuguese nation, managed to get themselves into Lisbon without the help of the Crusaders. The rest of the book concentrates on the proofreader's tale, and their ensuing romance.

Silva is kind of a funny character, a shy nerd who also seems to reflect a bit of Saramago himself. His extreme nervousness around Maria never gets tedious, and you end up rooting for him to pick up the phone and call her. Her role as his muse feels right, and she reminds me of Hector Berlioz's ladyfriend, who demanded he write his grand opera The Trojans in spite of all his self-doubts. The other layer of the story, Saramago's meditations on the nature of history and the veracity of various "true" historical events, is very well-done and concise, too. When posterity records Dom Alfonso Henriques as uttering implausibly eloquent St. Crispin's Day-esque royal speeches, what are we being encouraged to think? How should we regard the completely ridiculous miracles of the saints, like the story of St. Anthony and the donkey, that come straight out of Borges' "The Theologian"? This theme is enhanced by Saramago's trademark no quotes/long paragraphs/interweaving narrative style, with a wry authorial voice possessed of a dislike of war, a fondness for human irrationalities, and indulgent of digressions. It's a similar theme as Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, but though the book is shorter than that masterpiece, "Like any story, it can be told in ten words, or a hundred, or a thousand, or never end."

William Faulkner - King of endless paragraphs and phobic of punctuation - surfaces in the guise of Saramago. This author (better known for "Blindness" and "All The Names", and rightfully so) does certainly have a way with words and weaves philosophy, historiography and The Crusades through what is billed as a "love story". That the protagonist indeed begins a love affair with his newly-appointed manager is indisputible. What I contest is that this is in any way a remarkable development or an emphasis of the book. It was slow going until I "cracked the code" of the linguistic style Saramago employs to generate fluidity of narrative time-space and imbalance in the reader; once that improved I did enjoy the novel more. Still, I cannot recommend it enthusiastically to others as worth the time and effort.

This book took more time than usual for me to read. The problem with Saramago's book, at least for me, is that it requires good stretches of uninterrupted attention, something which has been a sparse thing these days. But I finally finished it today.

Saramago is up to his typical mischievousness here, lobbing another "what if"? The man's imagination is as boundless as his knowledge and wonder. The plot of this story hinges on a moment of whimsy on the part of a very ordinary, unwhimsical, unobtrusive and unassuming proofreader for a prestigious Lisbon publishing firm. While Raimundo Silva is proofing a manuscript on The History of the Siege of Lisbon, for reasons that Raimundo is later at a loss to explain, he adds the word "not" to a sentence that had originally stated that the crusaders had agreed to help the Portuguese in their siege of the Moor-held city of Lisbon. He is forgiven his moment of indiscretion, but a new position, a manager of proofreaders, is created to prevent future problems. Dr. Maria Sara is the woman hired, Raimundo's new boss. She presents two challenges for him, one to write this alternative history he has suggested by his impulsive editing; and a second, love.

As stepped, maze-like and rambling as the streets of Old Lisbon, the plot makes changes in time, verb tense and focus, which combined with Saramago's nontraditional approach to punctuation, creates a hurdy-gurdy world, which if to one's liking, is mesmerizing. Once when a friend called and wondered what I was doing, I told her "I was wasting away in Saramagoville" The author challenges our ideas of knowledge, history, historiography, human nature, language, love and the language of love. And there are the miracles; the recounting of the Miracles of St. Anthony, the Miracles of the holy knight, the miracles of love. Raimundo is very much an alter-ego for Saramago, and Raimundo's Maria Sara is Pilar, and both have alter-egos within Raimundo's story. There are times when identities, just as when standing on the balcony of Raimundo's apartment which is on the verge of Moorish Lisbon, Maria Sara askes would they have been Moors or Portuguese if it was the time of the siege. Neither is really sure. With his expansive library, Raimundo suggest they could look it up, but could the believe the answer?

The last paragraph is incandescently beautiful, but the beauty would not be there unless one muddled ones way to it. To give this book a fair shot, if one is considering reading it, read it when chunks time can be devoted to it.

This is now my most dog-eared book since as I read there would be one wry or profound insight after another. Since I did not want to lose my rhythm I stopped jotting them down and started dog-earring, something I never, never do. Yet with Saramago one can never say never.

With this engaging postmodern narrative Jose Saramago has created a complex tale that encompasses many themes including language, history and historiography, and war in the medieval world. At the same time the story dwells on the power of Eros over the mind and imagination and what results therefrom.

At the heart of this novel is Raimundo Silva, a middle-aged bachelor and proofreader in a contemporary Portuguese publishing house. However the focal point for Raimundo and the reader is the siege of the Moorish city of Lissibona (Lisbon) in 1147 by Portuguese forces under Christian King Alfonso I, its conquest and the expulsion of the Moors-a battle in which as many as 150,000 perished. Under the sway of his own fertile imagination, a dangerous thing for a proofreader, on one day Raimundo writes his own alternative history of the siege by changing a single word in a manuscript, thereby implying, contrary to the historical record, that the Crusaders refused to help the Portuguese besiege and capture the city.

Why does he do this? It seems that he is in love with the city of Lisbon as seen when the narrator says, "for it might well be that Lisbon, contrary to all appearances, was not a city but a woman, and the perdition simply amorous". But he is also enamored of his younger, iconoclastic boss, Maria Sara, with whom he falls in love. He is inexplicably encouraged by her to rewrite the entire history of the siege. He does so by continuing to weave a web of chivalrous deeds, love and intrigue around the bare historical record. The romantic affair with Maria blossoms, the apparent present and the imagined past meld into one another in a complicated narrative that shifts constantly between past and present tenses. In doing so it develops into a complex meditation on the meaning of both history and words as well as a romance and parable of life under authoritarian rule. Another major theme is Saramago's appreciation of the Reconquista, a central element in the history of Portugal as well as Spain, of which the conquest or re-conquest of Lisbon by Christians and its transformation into the capital of Portugal is a key event.

On one level, Saramago is exploring the thirst for power, religious and political fanaticism, intolerance, hypocrisy and jingoism, as well as the human need for love, companionship, sex. On another level, of more import for this reader, he is developing his abiding theme that history is a form of fiction, a selective reordering of facts. This reminds me of Tolstoy's philosophic musings near the end of War and Peace. Saramago's prose style does take some extra effort to adjust to with a stream-of-consciousness technique, long paragraphs, and serpentine sentences; but it is worth the effort and, like Faulkner and others with difficult prose styles, repays the reader who perseveres. This is nevertheless a mesmerizing tale that engages the reader's mind and emotions.

ساراماغو هنا مختلف عنه في العمى، على الرغم من طريقته الواضحة في الكتابة، إلا أنه مختلف هنا.

العمل يتراوح بين عالمين: عالم رايموندو سيلبا(الواقع)، وعالم حصار لشبونة الحقيقي والمزيف، كلمة واحدة (لا) غيرت مسار حياة رايموندو سيلبا وساقت له احتمالات جديدة لم يكن يتخيلها!
العمل ممتع وفلسفة ساراماغو مشوّقة وحواراته لذيذة، لكنه استطرد في مواضع كثيرة أصابتني بالملل.

الترجمة لابأس بها، على الرغم من وجود الكثير من الأخطاء

The least enjoyable Saramago I've read so far. It's not that I'm not used to his particlar style of writing - this being my sixth novel, I just found it a real tough one to get into. There is no denying it's a clever and original work, but I couldn't help but find parts of it rather dull, which forced me into skimming mode. Still, when I think of the likes of Blindness, Death with Interruptions, and The Double - my personal favourite, I'd say I've had my fare share of Saramago brilliance already. Chances were I was always going to come across one that didn't engross me as much. More thoughts to come.