![]() ![]() It is a love of, and on, this earth." – Irving Howe in The New York Times 1987. After initial efforts in the form of one published and one unpublished novel. Saramago was born in 1922, struggled against the poverty of his background as the son of landless peasants who resettled in Lisbon to become part of the urban poor. Saramago, a writer of sharp intelligence, keeps this love story under strict control, free of pathos or sentimentality. 2007, ISBN 0-15-603273-5, 14.00, 307 pages. "Much reverberates in memory after reading this enchanting novel, but most of all the love story which soars over the rest of the action like a flute across a heavy orchestra. The book served as the basis for the opera Blimunda (1990), composed by Azio Corghi. ![]() The lovers are always at center stage wrapped in Saramago's language, which ranges from short simple sentences to surrealistic, unpunctuated paragraphs that help to intensify both the action and the setting. ![]() Two young lovers interact naturally with historical characters including the composer and harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti and the priest Bartolomeu de Gusmão, recognized today as an aviation pioneer, all in the shadow of the Inquisition. It is an 18th-century love story intertwined with the construction of the Convent of Mafra, now one of Portugal's chief tourist attractions, as a background. Baltasar and Blimunda ( Portuguese: Memorial do Convento, 1982) is a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago. ![]()
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