Pääsykokeisiin luettu, ja piti myös lukea väkisin. Ideasta pidin, mutta Saramagon kirjoitustyyli ei iskenyt ja lukukokemus oli varsin tuskainen.

A reclusive proof-reader Raimundo Silva is unpersuaded by a history of the siege of Lisbon that he is working on and at the very end of the book introduces the word 'No' to upend the book's contention that crusaders assisted the proto-Portugese besiegers of the city inhabited by the Moors. That considered and at the same time highly impulsive action plummets him - and thereby allows Saramago - to critically contemplate the authenticity of history, the pitfalls of historiography, and how we arrive at certain understandings and convictions about past events that may be based on unreliable evidence and selection biases, and thereby could be very different from how we believe them to be. As Raimundo Silva imagines the city in the twelfth century, gazing at the cityscape that stretches down from his apartment window all the way to the distant waterscape, he makes significant observations and asks important questions about the siege from the point of view of the besieged as well as ordinary soldiers amongst the besiegers, breaking away from official narratives of national glory and religious zeal, tomes laying out miraculous events, and the myths, legends and lore that accrete around historical narratives.

This is a brilliant novel at multiple levels. There is first of all the style and structure. With its paragraph long sentences, often devoid of punctuation, it is not easy reading to get used to. But as one gets into it it communicates far more freely with the reader as Saramago shifts from one characters to the next and from one era to the other. Vacillating between the 20th and the 12th centuries, and between the burgeoning romance between Silva and his supervisor Maria Sara as well as that between a common soldier during the siege and an abducted concubine of a German crusader - Mogueime and Ouroana, this is simultaneously a deeply touching romance, a story 'inserted into history,' and a contemplation of human life, time, civilizations, war, fate, organized religion, faith, memory and human conflict. With layers upon layers it repeatedly strikes you with its profound insights as well as lyricism of language - like so many great fiction writers of distinctive style, Saramago was a poet for many years before he took to longer prose.

The afterword aptly captures the temporal experiments of the novel: "Keen that his reader should move easily back and forth between the present, the recorded and the imagined past, in this novel Saramago also freely shifts between past and present tenses, conveying the impression of the timelessness of the human imagination. The temporary fluidity is further emphasized by the strategic location of the proof-reader's flat within the precinct of the old Moorish fortress, a kind of watchtower from where the perception of past and present alternate according to the proof-reader's mood."

Striking also is the detailed description of the mechanics and brutality of siege-warfare - the assaults as darts, spears, javelins, arrows rain down from the battlements, the gigantic wooden siege towers, the hand to hand combat, the corpses thrown into graves stripped of all their clothes, the prostitutes on the fringes of the conflict paid with the bloodied clothes stripped off the corpses, the travails of famine brought about by the siege, and the inevitable slaughter of young and old that followed in that age. Palpable at the same time is Saramago's empathy with the besieged and the highlighting of their virtues as they looked upon sudden death. The scenes that describe the blind muezzin, his resolve, his apprehensions and his perseverance, are quite moving as is his narration of the episode of the heroic emissary sent by the besiegers who came back with a disappointing answer from a cowardly king of the same race and religion, not abandoning those who had sent him in order to selfishly seek safety, and whose drowned body was found in the river.

Saramago the poet cannot resist but capturing every available poignant metaphor, comparing the sieges of cities and the sieges of those in love that love must overcome. "We seem to be at war, Of course we're at war, and it's a war of siege, each of us besieges the other and is besieged in turn, we want to break down the other's walls while defending our own, love means getting rid of all barriers, love is the end of all sieges."

One can imagine how irreverent this work must have been deemed amongst those who are politically or religiously conservative. As Raimundo Silva is inspired by Maria Sara to take on the official narrative of the Portuguese conquest and write his own version, he discovers not just nobility, civility and valor in the Moor - humanizing the enemy - but a whole host of mundane and material factors (primarily considerations to do with expected rewards and right to pillage and loot) driving the besiegers as well as persuading the Crusaders to not assist. The nationalist and religious glorification and the reported miracles around and after the conflict are constantly at the receiving end of Saramago's sharp wit as are those who characterize such conflicts in human history as battles between God and Allah. At the same time, there is a conscious move away from the exalted and privileged figures to depict the ordinary combatants; the risk, shortness, vulnerability and brutality of their lives; and the frequently wretched anonymity and disgraceful nature of their deaths.

What I particularly loved in addition to Saramago's brilliant takes on time, history and historiography is the quality of writing itself, describing the old quarters and topography of Lisbon, the picturesque views and vistas, the reluctance and hesitation of middle-age in amorous matters, and the incomparable euphoria of love. Living over the remains of what were once the inhabitations of another people in a different age - who also lived, loved and dreamt there - Saramago produces exquisite prose combining nostalgia, extant connections with the past, and the recurrence of the human experience in all its beauty as well as sadness. Some quotes:

"Thanks to a clear sky, the sun was still shining over the city, already from the direction of the sea, as it went down, casting a gentle light, bestowing a luminous caress to which the windows-panes on the hillside would soon respond, first with flaring torches, then turning pale, dwindling to a tiny fragment of flickering glass, until finally extinguished as twilight begins to sift its ashes between the buildings, concealing the gables, as the noise of the city down below dies away and withdraws beneath the silence spreading from these streets to on high where Raimundo Silva lives."

"There was a full moon,, one of those moons that transform the world into a ghostly apparition, when all things, living and inanimate, whisper mysterious revelations, each expressing its own, and all of them discordant, therefore we never come to understand them and we suffer the anguish of almost but never quite knowing."

"...what is important is to note the differences between then and now, in order to speak, or to kill, it is necessary to get close ..."

“…the author only knows what his characters have been, even then not everything, and very little of what they will become …”

Lyrical, evocative, irreverent, witty, and deeply reflective, an absolutely brilliant novel by Jose Saramago. Highly inventive in structure and narrative style it demonstrates why it's essential to look at history critically and not believe everything we are taught.

"Parece que estamos em guerra, Claro que estamos em guerra, e é guerra de sítio, cada um de nós cerca o outro e é cercado por ele, queremos deitar abaixo os muros do outro e continuar com os nossos, o amor será não haver mais barreiras, o amor é o fim do cerco."

I can tell this is a work of art but one I don't get. Lots of superfluous language for a theoretical, philosophical exercise in history and language. It would be great for a graduate level course discussion, but I didn't enjoy reading it.

Historical science and the real past of the mankind…

It has always struck me that history is not real life, literature, yes, and nothing else…”

The History of the Siege of Lisbon is a spread and ironic contemplation on the theme of credibility of history as science. Indeed, it is enough to change, delete or add a single word in some historical manuscript and the entire described event will be seen in a different light or will turn into its own opposite…
And how often, copying original texts in their scriptoriums, did monastic scribes change them to their own liking or adjust them according to the current beliefs and religious fashions?

Certain authors, perhaps out of conviction or an attitude of mind not much given to patient investigation, hate having to acknowledge that the relationship between what we call cause and what we subsequently describe as the effect is not always linear and explicit. They allege, and with some justification, that ever since the world began, although we may have no way of knowing when it began, there has never been an effect without a cause, and every cause, whether because pre-ordained or by some simple mechanism, has brought about and will go on bringing about some effect or other, which, let it be said, is produced instantly, although the transition from cause to effect may have escaped the observer or only come to be more or less reconstituted much later.

José Saramago wrote this novel also to illustrate such complex and nonlinear causality.
But there is more to it, The History of the Siege of Lisbon is as well the history of the siege of the female heart…

It would not take much learning to observe, as much today as in those medieval times, despite the Church’s disapproval of classical similes, how Eros and Thanatos were paired off…

Both cities and female hearts must be conquered by siege.

Jose Saramago wrote a romance? Yes, that José Saramago, the 1998 Nobel Laureate for Literature. And not only is The History of the Siege of Lisbon a romance, it’s a romance about middle-aged, grey-haired proof-readers. Imagine Bernardo Soares’ in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and change his profession from accountant to proofreader: Saramago’s Raimundo Benvindo Silva is a lonely, isolated, inward looking proof-reader. Silva simultaneously respects his profession and acknowledges its sometimes crushing boredom: ”Consider, Sir, the daily life of proof-readers, think of the horror of having to read once, twice, three or four or five times books that, Probably would not even warrant a first reading.” His current assignment is proof-reading a 437 page, tedious history of the 1147 siege of Lisbon during which the Muslims were defeated and evicted by Christian crusaders on their way to recapture the Holy Land. In a remarkable moment of independence and creativity, Silva refuses ”to let the cobbler stick to his last” and restores heroism to twelfth century Portuguese history: ”he holds his biro with a steady hand and adds a word to the page, a word the historian never wrote, that for the sake of historical truth he could never have brought himself to write, the word NOT, and what the book now says is that the crusaders will NOT help the Portuguese to conquer Lisbon”.

Could the proof-reader Raimondo Benvindo Silva change the course of Portugueses history? The History of the Siege of Lisbon may be a romance, but more than that it’s also an exploration of how tenuous our understanding of history can be. Saramago’s instrument for doing this — the all-important not — demonstrates the limits of our historical knowledge. Silva, his correction caught by his employers, is asked to write his own history of the siege of Lisbon. What follows in A History of the Siege of Lisbon is too complicated to recount here, but Saramago takes anyone interested in Lisbon history on a wonderful trip through its streets, stairways, neighborhoods, and hills; invents lovers; and altogether entwines the geek love of the two proof-readers with the love affair between the invented twelfth century soldier and the concubine inamorata.

While A History of the Siege of Lisbon isn’t among my favorite Saramago novels, it’s one worth thinking about, rereading, and learning from, especially to understand Saramago’s playful and flexible concept of history and his evident love of Lisbon.

É tão tão bom e reconfortante regressar a quem sempre nos deslumbra e delicia!!!

Não é o meu favorito de Saramaguinho, mas tenho um carinho deveras especial pelo Raimundo revisor!

Opinião detalhadinha aqui: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1_5q...

NOTA - 09/10

Adorei, arrependi-me instantaneamente por estar só agora a iniciar a minha incursão pelo mundo de Saramago (talvez em resposta ao estudo forçado do "Memorial do Convento"). Neste livro a premissa é simples - Raimundo Silva é revisor e, num devaneio que só se reserva a quem conta um conto, acrescenta um ponto. Passados os castigos e as ofensas, é desafiado a imaginar que a sua fabricação é real - e assim começa a história, como acaba cabe a quem a ler.

Aqui, onde Saramago se esmera, sem sombra de dúvida, é nas pontadas com que que termina as frases, nos diálogos de tirar o fôlego, na sua cadência de toma lá dá cá incansável. Há momentos em que as diatribes se tornam demasiado e demasiado específicas, o referido dá-se por garantido mas fica sempre a sensação de haver algo por dizer. Mas enfim, nada é perfeito.

Restored my faith in Saramago’s novels and love how he weaves his romance stories.

The book is over 300 pages long, contains about 75 paragraphs and only one period per paragraph. Typical of Saramago, and in my opinion, very entertaining. He begins with the story of a rather mediocre proofreader who gets annoyed with the over-confident author of a trade history book (hey, I had one of those on my dissertation committee! Just awful). So the proofreader deletes a "not" from a key passage. The dustjacket claims that this changes the course of history, but Saramago is not a Star Trek type sci-fi writer. Instead the book is full of the everyday angst of its undistinguished hero--"Which way should I walk to work today?" and "Should I or shouldn't I dye my hair?" for four or five pages, that kind of thing. It is a lot of fun to read, unless you happen to be going through a serious bout of angst in your own life at the moment.

And what the proofreader does to the history of the siege of Lisbon is pretty amusing, too.

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."

(PT) Raimundo Silva, um revisor, decide mudar uma palavra num livro sobre a história da tomada de Lisboa por D. Afonso Henriques, em 1147. Imaginava que tal ato de rebeldia trouxesse consequências aos seus patrões, mas não imaginaria que trouxessem uma diretora para supervisar futuras revisões. E ela tem um desafio para Raimundo: escrever a sua versão da História do Cerco de Lisboa pelos cristãos.