by José Saramago · Círculo De Lectores · tapa dura · ISBN 9788467235548
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«El viaje del elefante» is the historical novel by José Saramago, published by Círculo de Lectores in hardback (220 pages, in Spanish).
In the mid-16th century, King John III of Portugal gives his cousin, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, an Asian elephant named Salomón. The novel follows the journey of the elephant and his keeper from Lisbon to Vienna, amid incidents and an astonished Europe. Saramago combines historical facts and fiction with humour and irony to reflect on the human condition.
Translation by Pilar del Río. José Saramago wrote this novel ten years after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature.
José de Sousa Saramago was a Portuguese writer. He was the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant."
