by José Saramago · Punto De Lectura · tapa blanda · ISBN 9788466301626
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«Memorial del convento» is the historical novel by José Saramago, published by Punto de Lectura in paperback (480 pages, in Spanish).
Set in 18th-century Portugal, in the time of the Inquisition, the novel interweaves the king's promise to build a Franciscan convent with the story of Baltasar Mateus, a one-handed former soldier, and Blimunda, a woman able to see inside people and things. Together with Father Bartolomeu Lourenço, they attempt to build the passarola, a flying machine that defies the established power, in a tale that mixes history, imagination and social criticism.
Work originally published in 1982; this 2001 Spanish edition belongs to the Punto de Lectura collection.
Recommended for readers of historical fiction and contemporary literary fiction, especially for those seeking novels with elements of magical realism.
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."
