Baltasar and Blimunda

by José Saramago

Book Overview

From Jos? Saramago, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Baltasar and Blimunda is a "brilliant...enchanting novel" (The New York Times Book Review) of romance, deceit, religion, and magic set in eighteenth-century Portugal at the height of the Inquisition. Portugal, 1711: an amorous friar is pursued naked through the rubble-strewn streets of Lisbon; an enthusiastic procession of flagellants roars with pleasure over the damnation...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156005204
• ISBN13: 9780156005203
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Pure Genious

I had the oppurtunity to read this charming novel a few years ago and I have never been able to stop returning and re-reading the book. Saramago does an excellent job of telling a truly beautiful love story without so much as having one word in the novel hinting towards it. His descriptions were so vivid in the book that I felt as if I were in Portugal watching those poor men build a monument for the sole pleasures of the portuguese monarchy. The thing that I love most is that book is also historically correct. There really was a king who had a huge convent built as a thank you for a male heir and there really was a priest who tried to make a flying machine during the Inquisition. I recomend this book to all people. The sheer magic of a beutiful age in Portugal will make you feel one with the author and the characters. And may I add that I have visited the Convent of Mafra and it's absolutely beautiful and it's great to see something that had so much meaning in the novel.

A sensuous history lesson

There seems to be an affinity among Hispanic authors like Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes, whose fiction tends to combine rich, often fantastical, narrative landscapes with sensitive attention to socioeconomic issues and political and religious oppression. Jose Saramago is Portugese, but "Baltasar and Blimunda" shows that he is very much part of this esteemed group.The novel takes place in Portugal in the early eighteenth century. An ex-soldier named Baltasar "Sete-Sois" (Seven Suns) Mateus arrives in Lisbon in 1711 looking for work. His options are limited, as he has lost his left hand in battle and replaced it with a hook, which qualifies him for employment in a slaughterhouse. He meets and falls in love with a girl named Blimunda, whose mother, accused of heresy by the Inquisition, has been banished to Africa. Blimunda purports to having some strange powers: She can look inside people's souls and even collect their "wills", a skill which will prove invaluable later in the novel. Baltasar and Blimunda befriend a learned and mechanically-minded Brazilian priest named Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco, who is something of a flight pioneer. He convinces Baltasar to help him build a flying machine called the Passarola, which, he envisions, would be powered by a complex system of components including human "wills" that Blimunda, conveniently enough, is able to collect. That the Passarola is a ludicrously unfeasible contraption does not stop it from flying fortunately, for it allows its makers to escape angry Inquisitors.Meanwhile, the King of Portugal, Dom Joao, anxious for a royal heir, is making a deal with a Franciscan friar to donate money for a new convent if the Queen, Dona Maria Ana, will deliver, so to speak. The Queen makes good on this several times over, so the King buys land from some farmers, one of whom happens to be Baltasar's father, and construction of the new convent is begun. As a source of boastful pride and a symbol of the overt alliance between the Church and the Crown, the convent turns into a Tower-of-Babel-like project, a ruthless shedder of blood, sweat, and tears.Calling "Baltasar and Blimunda" a love story -- even a brilliant one -- is not giving it full credit. Saramago incorporates real historical figures and events into the plot, such as the Italian harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti who emigrates to Lisbon; and, apparently, a priest named Lourenco really did build a working flying machine. (Of course, it's unlikely that Lourenco and Scarlatti actually ever met, but for the purpose of fiction, that possibility needs to be milked for all it's worth.) Saramago's prose is like a stiletto wrapped in silk; his sardonic tone offers wry observations on the disparities between royalty and peasantry and the cruelty and pageantry of the Church at the time. Yet, in one of the most beautiful and bittersweet endings I've ever read in any novel, he reminds his reader that love is the ultimate sovereign.

A love story with which you will fall in love

There is something absolutely compelling about the love that exists between the title characters of this masterpiece. It is the sort of love that makes you want to go out and find it for yourself, one that hollows out from the surrounding absurdities of the world a separate peace in which it can exist.For being a love story, though, Saramago adopts a very original approach to portraying Baltasar and Blimunda. He does not explain their love, he does not justify it, he does not even describe it. They simply love each other -- that is all you know and all you need to know.The majority of the book isn't even about them. Most of the pages are spent in outright hilarious passages describing the frivolity and ostentations of royalty and the church in 18th century Portugal. Unlike much anti-clerical writing, this is done without anger or bitterness. Saramago takes an almost playful approach to the absurdities of the establishment -- the first 20 pages alone are enough to make the entire book worthwhile. The king and his court are a joke.In the second half of the book, though, they slowly become a sad joke. This part of the book revolves around the construction of an abbey in Baltasar's home town of Mafra, and Saramago progressively shows the human cost of the royal whims. With heartbreaking resignation and bitterness, he shows how the king's decrees interrupt and destroy the lives of ordinary men and women.And yet, in the midst of all this, Baltasar and Blimunda persist, neither caught up in the absurdities of the court nor trodden down by the resulting oppressions. They have no intentions in life and are merely happy to live that life by each other's sides. Saramago manages to say more about them in whole chapters of writing about other things entirely than in the scattered paragraphs he devotes to their companionship. The contrast is powerful.In short, this is a novel at times debilitatingly funny and at times deeply touching, and through it all runs the thread of a man and woman who love each other and need no explanation.

A tale from the oral tradition

This masterpiece by the Nobel laureate, José Saramago, has an epic quality that raises it above the ordinary. The backdrop against which the story is told is Portugal in the eighteenth century, a superstition-ridden country peopled by masses who still believe in miracles, in times when theological standards are unbending and any deviation from the accepted norm is punished as sorcery. Baltasar, a crippled soldier returns home from war to such a milieu. He represents Everyman living a life of quiet dignity, pushed around occasionally by circumstance, cherishing little joys and comforts with his consort, Blimunda. The binding force of the story is the tender relationship between Baltasar and Blimunda, a love that is not expressed in words and that does not wane with time. A third character in the novel is Lourenco, the "Flying Priest." The three are brought together by a seemingly impossible dream of constructing a flying machine. What is special about the book is the writer's narratorial skill: Saramago takes on the traditional role of a story-teller without being clever or fantastical. He narrates a plain, simple story without any superfluous embellishments. It is this simplicity and honesty that goes straight to the heart and lingers on. The author does not pause to indulge in verbal pirouettes or stylistic gymnastics. Nor does he gloss over metaphors and similes to conjure elaborate conceits out of them. Saramago borrows several features from the oral tradition: Baltasar and Blimunda is a stringing together of several loosely-related episodes and incidents, yet there is a structural circularity in the whole. The tone is sometimes easy and conversational when focused on specific incidents, sometimes it has an incantatory quality, sometimes it slows its pace to describe the mire and filth through which the characters must toil; and sometimes it soars high into the skies with the Passarola.The story of Baltasar and Blimunda seems to get its power from the rhythms of the cosmos which it invokes constantly. The two main characters are nick-named after the sun and the moon. There are repeated references to the wind, the rain, to cyclical motions of time, to the earth, the heavens and the sky. In the attempt to fly into the skies one may detect the Lucifer motif or, more appropriately, the Icarus pattern: human aspirations daring to dream, foraging into the unknown and, of course, paying a price for the dream. Baltasar's fate reminds us that such is man's lot. All the while the heavens remain unperturbed, always beckoning, always tempting man to soar higher and higher. That man's reach should exceed his grasp or what else is the heaven for? This is what the author seems to suggest.After putting the book aside, the reader is left with a lingering impression of a pair of lovers wrenched apart: he flying high somewhere in the mysterious spaces above, she roaming the world aimlessly, weeping, wailing,

Love and Fantasy in Baroque Lisbon, haunted by Inquisition

SPOILER: Set in the Portuguese 17th Century, BALTASAR AND BLIMUNDA is one of the most touching love stories I have ever read. Baltasar is a cripled war survivor that lost his left hand and got a hook instead. He has his own views about God, namely that, He, too is a cripled since nowhere is his left hand refferred to (Christ sits at His right hand, etc.) Blimunda is a mysterious Girl whose mother is accused of Witchcraft and burned at the stake in front of her by the Inquisition. At that moment the girl sees Baltasar who is also (like most of the City's people) attending the Act of Faith, and Blimunda's soul is blended to his by legacy of her mother's soul. Blimunda inherited also other of her mother's gifts, most prominent of them, the ability to see inside people... Literally. An uncanny gift against which Blimunda has only one remedy: to eat bread right after waking up. They choose to stay with each other... Unmarried. Together they are hired by Jesuit savant priest Bartholomew de Gusmão, who has his own dangerous views about God, Science and Faith in this time of fierce Inquisition. They are to help him with his very secret, very daring project: a flying machine... The Baroque Age is at its greatest splendour. The Horrors of the Inquisition are at their most terrible and the King of Portugal does not have a heir. He makes a promise to God that he'll have built the biggest convent that Portugal has ever seen if he's blessed with a Son. The Queen gives birth. And the Convent will be built! If you enjoyed baroque stories like RESTAURATION you will be dazzled by this Jewell. The author, Saramago writes with a neverinding, unponctuated paragraph style, that reminds the ancient royal chroniclers. Please, PLEASE don't let this draw you back from the book. Make an effort to go through the first two chapters and you'll get used to it. More: you'll be hooked.