Jose Saramago Books In Order

Blindness Books In Publication Order

Blindness (1995)
Seeing (2004)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (1977)
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984)
The Stone Raft (1986)
Baltasar & Blimunda (1987)
The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989)
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991)
All the Names (1997)
The Tale of the Unknown Island (1997)
The Cave (2000)
The Double (2002)
Death at Intervals / Death with Interruptions (2008)
The Elephant’s Journey (2008)
Cain (2009)
Raised from the Ground (2012)
Skylight (2014)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

Journey to Portugal (1983)
Small Memories (2006)
The Notebook (2008)

Blindness Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Jose Saramago Books Overview

Blindness

A city is hit by an epidemic of ‘white Blindness‘ which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glas*ses, a dog of tears through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man’s will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Seeing

On election day in the capital, it is raining so hard that no one has bothered to come out to vote. The politicians are growing jittery. What’s going on? Should they reschedule the elections for another day? Around three o’clock, the rain finally stops. Promptly at four, voters rush to the polling stations, as if they had been ordered to appear. But when the ballots are counted, more than 70 percent are blank. The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. The president proposes that a wall be built around the city to contain the revolution. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that had hit the city four years before, and of the one woman who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? Is she the organizer of a conspiracy against the state? A police superintendent is put on the case. What begins as a satire on governments and the sometimes dubious efficacy of the democratic system turns into something far more sinister. A singular novel from the author of Blindness. 20060416

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy is Jos Saramago’s first novel. Written eight years before the critically acclaimed Baltasar and Blimunda, it is a story of self discovery, set against the background of the last years of Salazar s dictatorship. A struggling young artist, commissioned to paint a portrait of an influential industrialist, learns in the process about himself and the world around him. The brilliant juxtaposition of a passionate love story and the crisis of a nation foreshadows all of Saramago s major works. A must for any devotee of the great Portuguese Nobel laureate, available in the United States for the first time.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Lisbon. 1936. Ricardo Reis is a doctor, returning to his native Portugal from Brazil after 16 years away. But what kind of doctor is he? His companions include: the ghost of the poet Pessoa; a girl with a paralysed hand; and the hotel chambermaid, who slips into his bed at night.

The Stone Raft

When the Iberian Peninsula breaks free of Europe and begins to drift across the North Atlantic, five people are drawn together on the newly formed island first by surreal events and then by love. A splendidly imagined epic voyage…
a fabulous fable Kirkus Reviews. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

Baltasar & Blimunda

From the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, a brilliant…
enchanting novel New York Times Book Review of romance, deceit, religion, and magic set in eighteenth century Portugal at the height of the Inquisition. National bestseller. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon

Raimundo Silva, a proofreader at a Portuguese publishing house, takes it upon himself to alter a key word in a text to make it read that in 1147 the king of Portugal reconquered Lisbon from the Saracens without any assistance from the Crusaders. His revision of a signal episode in Portuguese history unexpectedly and inexplicably wins the heart of his supervisor, Maria Sara, a woman of unwavering conviction. Rather than fire him as she ought to, Maria encourages Raimundo to rewrite The History of the Siege of Lisbon in the grand style of a historical romance. Around this seemingly minor episode Jose Saramago constructs a broad, multifaceted tableau involving meditations on historiography and the uses and abuses of language, a parable of life under authoritarian rule, and a bittersweet romance.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

For Jose Saramago, the life of Jesus Christ and the story of His Passion are things of this earth. A child crying, a gust of wind, the caress of a woman half asleep, the bleat of a goat or the bark of a dog, a prayer uttered in the grayish morning light. The adolescent Jesus is very much an adolescent: questioning, uncompromising, troubled by the world and by his body. His mother, like any mother, is devoted, fearful, resentful. The Holy Family has the complex frictions of any family. Yet this is not simple, debunking realism, for Saramago also fills his pages with vision, dream, and omen. And the defiance of the authority of God the Father, the righteous indignation on behalf of man, the anger is still not denial of Him.

All the Names

Senhor Jos is a low grade clerk in the city’s Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are his daily preoccupations. In the evenings and on weekends, he works on bringing up to date his clipping file of the famous, the rising stars, the notorious. But when he comes across the birth certificate of an anonymous young woman, he decides that this cannot have been mere chance, that he has to discover more about her. Under the increasingly mystified eye of the Registrar, a godlike figure whose name is spoken only in whispers, the now obsessed Senhor Jos sets off to follow the thread that leads him to the unknown woman but as he gets closer to a meeting with her, he discovers more about her, and about himself, than he would have wished. The loneliness of people’s lives, the effects of chance and moments of recognition, the discovery of love, however tentative once again Jos Saramago has written a timeless story.

The Tale of the Unknown Island

A man went to knock at the king’s door and said to him, Give me a boat. The king’s house had many other doors, but this was the door for petitions. Since the king spent all his time sitting by the door for favors favors being done to the king, you understand, whenever he heard someone knocking on the door for petitions, he would pretend not to hear…
‘ Why the petitioner required a boat, where he was bound for, and who volunteered to crew for him the reader will discover as this short narrative unfolds. And at the end it will be clear that if we thought we were reading a children’s fable we were wrong we have been reading a love story and a philosophical tale worthy of Voltaire or Swift.

The Cave

Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his daughter Marta and her husband Mar al in a small village on the outskirts of The Center, an imposing complex of shops, apartment blocks, offices, and sensation zones. Mar al works there as a security guard, and Cipriano drives him to work each day before delivering his own humble pots and jugs. On one such visit, he is told not to make any more deliveries until further notice. People prefer plastic, he is told; it lasts longer and doesn’t break. Unwilling to give up his craft, Cipriano tries his hand at making ceramic dolls. Astonishingly, The Center places an order for hundreds of figurines, and Cipriano and Marta set to work. In the meantime, Cipriano meets a young widow at the graves of their recently departed spouses, and a hesitant romance begins. When Marta learns that she is pregnant and Mar al receives a promotion, they all move into an apartment in The Center. Soon they hear a mysterious sound of digging, and one night Mar al and Cipriano investigate. Horrified by the discovery, the family, which now includes the widow and a dog, sets off in a truck, heading for the great unknown. Suffused with the depth, humor, and above all the extraordinary sense of humanity that marks each of his novels, The Cave is sure to become an essential book of our time.

The Double

Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a history teacher in a secondary school. He is divorced, involved in a rather one sided relationship with a bank clerk, and he is depressed. To lift his depression, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. Tertuliano watches the film and is unimpressed. During the night, noises in his apartment wake him. He goes into the living room to find that the VCR is replaying the video, and as he watches in astonishment he sees a man who looks exactly like him or, more specifically, exactly like the man he was five years before, mustachioed and fuller in the face. He sleeps badly. Against his own better judgment, Tertuliano decides to pursue his double. As he establishes the man’s identity, what begins as a whimsical story becomes a dark meditation on identity and, perhaps, on the crass assumption behind cloning that we are merely our outward appearance rather than the sum of our experiences.

Death at Intervals / Death with Interruptions

Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s brilliant new novel poses the question what happens when the grim reaper decides there will be no more death? On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Then reality hits home families are left to care for the permanently dying, life insurance policies become meaningless, and funeral parlors are reduced to arranging burials for pet dogs, cats, hamsters, and parrots. Death sits in her chilly apartment, where she lives alone with scythe and filing cabinets, and contemplates her experiment: What if no one ever died again? What if she, death with a small d, became human and were to fall in love?

The Elephant’s Journey

In 1551, King Jo o III of Portugal gave Archduke Maximilian an unusual wedding present: an elephant named Solomon. The Elephant’s Journey from Lisbon to Vienna was witnessed and remarked upon by scholars, historians, and ordinary people. Out of this material, Jos Saramago has spun a novel already heralded as a triumph of language, imagination, and humor El Pa s. Solomon and his keeper, Subhro, begin in dismal conditions, forgotten in a corner of the palace grounds. When it occurs to the king and queen that an elephant would be an appropriate wedding gift, everyone rushes to get them ready: Subhro is given two new suits of clothes and Solomon a long overdue scrub. Accompanied by the Archduke, his new wife, and the royal guard, our unlikely heroes traverse a continent riven by the Reformation and civil wars. They make their way through the storied cities of northern Italy: Genoa, Piacenza, Mantua, Verona, Venice, and Trento, where the Council of Trent is in session. They brave the Alps and the terrifying Isarco and Brenner Pas*ses; they sail across the Mediterranean Sea and up the Inn River elephants, it turns out, are natural sailors. At last they make their grand entry into the imperial city. The Elephant s Journey is a delightful, witty tale of friendship and adventure.

Cain

The late Nobel laureate’s final novel, a radical retelling of the Old Testament ‘Reading the Portuguese writer Jos Saramago, one quickly senses the presence of a master.’ Christian Science Monitor ‘Saramago is the most tender of writers…
with a clear eyed and compassionate acknowledgment of things as they are, and a quality that can only be termed wisdom.’ New York Times ‘Saramago is arguably the greatest writer of our time.’ Chicago Tribune In this, his last novel, Saramago daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Bible through the story of Cain. Condemned to wander forever after he kills Abel, he is whisked around in time and space. He experiences the almost sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, the Tower of Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Joshua at the battle of Jericho, Job s ordeal, and finally Noah s ark and the Flood. And over and over again Cain encounters an unjust, even cruel God. A startling, beautifully written, and powerful book, in all ways a fitting end to Saramago s extraordinary career.

Journey to Portugal

When Jos Saramago decided some twenty years ago to write a book about Portugal, his only desire was that it be unlike all other books on the subject, and in this he has certainly succeeded. Recording the events and observations of a journey across the length and breadth of the country he loves dearly, Saramago brings Portugal to life as only a writer of his brilliance can. Forfeiting sources of information such as tourist guides and road maps, he scours the country with the eyes and ears of an observer fascinated by the ancient myths and history of his people. Whether an inaccessible medieval fortress set on a cliff, a wayside chapel thick with cobwebs, or a grand mansion in the city, the extraordinary places of this land come alive with kings, warriors, painters, explorers, writers, saints, and sinners. Always meticulously attentive to those elements of ancient Portugal that persist today, Saramago examines the country in its current period of rapid transition and growth. Infused with the tenderness and intelligence that have become familiar to his readers, Saramago’s Journey to Portugal is an ode of love for a country and its rich traditions.

Small Memories

Jos Saramago was eighteen months old when he moved from the village of Azinhaga with his father and mother to live in Lisbon. But he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence to stay with his maternal grandparents, illiterate peasants in the eyes of the outside world, but a fount of knowledge, affection, and authority to young Jos . Shifting back and forth between childhood and his teenage years, between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this is a mosaic of memories, a simply told, affecting look back into the author’s boyhood: the tragic death of his older brother at the age of four; his mother pawning the family s blankets every spring and buying them back in time for winter; his beloved grandparents bringing the weaker piglets into their bed on cold nights; and Saramago s early encounters with literature, from teaching himself to read by deciphering articles in the daily newspaper, to poring over an entertaining dialogue in a Portuguese French conversation guide, not realizing that he was in fact reading a play by Moli re. Written with Saramago s characteristic wit and honesty, Small Memories traces the formation of an artist fascinated by words and stories from an early age and who emerged, against all odds, as one of the world s most respected writers.

The Notebook

A unique journey into the personal and political world of the Nobel laureate and author of Blindness. I only spoke because it was impossible to continue any longer in silence. Jose Saramago Provocative and lyrical, The Notebook is a record of a year in the life of Jose Saramago. On the eve of the 2008 US presidential election, the author started jotting down his reflections on the world in which he lives. He evokes life in his beloved city of Lisbon, conversations with friends, and meditations on his favorite authors, often rendered with pointillist detail: precise observations on stories and moments of arresting significance that together comprise an acute view of our times. Characteristically critical and uncompromising, Saramago dissects the financial crisis, deplores Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, traces the ongoing inquiry into the execution of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground, and charts the transition from the era of George W. Bush to that of Barack Obama. Available for the first time in English, The Notebook offers a rare glimpse into the mind of one of the most original writers of our time. .