by José Saramago · Alfaguara · tapa dura · ISBN 9788420400532
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«La balsa de piedra» is the novel by José Saramago, published by Alfaguara in hardback (350 pages, in Spanish).
A crack opens the Pyrenees and separates the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of Europe, turning it into a floating island that drifts across the Atlantic. From that unusual premise, Saramago reflects on the identity of the Iberian peoples, their relationship with America, and resistance to pressure from the great European powers.
Translation by Basilio Losada of «A jangada de pedra», a novel originally published in 1986; this edition is from 2003.
Work for those interested in the fiction of José Saramago, Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, and in symbolic fictions with a political and social background.
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."
