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Jose Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922. His oeuvre embraces plays, poetry, memoirs and several novels which have been translated into more than 20 languages. It was the publication in 1988 of Baltasar & Blimunda that first brought him to the attention of an English-speaking readership. This novel won the Portuguese PEN Club Award, as did his next, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, which also won the Independent Foreign Fiction Award. His fiction has since established him as one of Europe's most influential living writers. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Giovanni Pointiero, formerly Reader in Latin-American Literature in the University of Manchester, was Saramago's regular English translator. His translation of The Gospel according to Jesus Christ was awarded the Teixeira-Gomes Prize for Portuguese translation. He was also the principal English translator of the works of Clarice Lispector. He died in 1996.
From noted Portuguese writer Saramago (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, 1993, etc.), a playful what-if tale - what if the earth were to crack and the Iberian Peninsula started sailing across the Atlantic? - that also slyly satirizes current European and international politics. As in all good fables, the catastrophe here is preceded by ominous but random happenings that lend an air of bogus authority and mystery to a story that is to be enjoyed as much for itself as for the potshots it takes. In Portugal, Joana Carda, who has just left her husband, scratches the ground with an elm bough, and the line cannot be erased; the famous barkless dogs of Cerbere suddenly begin to bark; Joaquim Sassa throws a heavy stone into the sea that lands far out of sight; Jose Anai??o, out on a morning stroll, is followed by a flock of starlings; a widow, Maria Guavaira, finds an old sock that endlessly unravels; and in Spain, aging Pedro Orce gets up from his chair and feels the earth tremble beneath his feet. Next, cracks appear along the Pyrenees mountains, and, as they rapidly widen, Spain and Portugal are soon cut off from the rest of Europe. Tourists panic; local peasants occupy the now-empty hotels. As the peninsula heads out into the Atlantic, abandoning the disputed Rock of Gibraltar along the way, politicians make ineffectual statements and vague promises of help; European youths, declaring We are Iberians too, riot in sympathy. And while the peninsula just misses the Azores, seems bound for Newfoundland, then alters its course and sails south, the long thread that Maria had unraveled somehow brings the apparent prognosticators of the event together. By car and then by wagon, they wander across the land, finding love and adventure along the way, as well as an understanding of how all things in this world are linked together. A splendidly imagined epic voyage on an unlikely ship manned by political trimmers as well as the loving in heart. A fabulous fable. (Kirkus Reviews)
