History of the Siege of Lisbon.

SARAMAGO, Jose.

Item Number: 114598

New York: Harcourt, 1996.

First American edition of this magical tale of love, memory, and the revision of things past. Octavo, original half cloth. Signed by Jose Saramago on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Vaughn Andrews. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero.

The Portugese writer Jose Saramago is the recipient of both the 1995 Camões Prize and 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature. Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the greatest living novelist" and considers him to be "a permanent part of the Western canon (Evans, 2002)."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" (The Los Angeles Times Book Review).