A proofreader realizes his power to edit the truth on a whim, in a “brilliantly original” novel by a Nobel Prize winner (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Raimundo Silva is a middle-aged, celibate clerk, proofing manuscripts for a respectable publishing house. Fluent in Portuguese, he has been assigned to work on a standard history of the country, and the twelfth-century king who laid siege to Lisbon. In a moment of subversive daring, Raimundo decides to change just one single word of text—a capricious revision that completely undoes the past. When discovered, his insolent disregard for facts appalls his employers—save for his new editor, Maria Sara. She suggests that Rainmundo take his transgressions even further. Through Rainmundo and Maria’s eyes, what transpires is an alternate view of history and a colorful reinvention of a debatable truth. It’s a serpentine journey through time where past and present converge, fact becomes myth, and fiction and reality blur—especially for Rainmundo and Maria themselves, who begin to find themselves erotically drawn to each other. “Walter Mitty has nothing on Raimundo Silva . . . this hypnotic tale is a great comic romp through history, language and the imagination.” —Publishers Weekly Translated by Giovanni Pontiero

A proofreader in a publishing house changes a word in a manuscript to make a history book read that a 12th Century battle was strictly a Portuguese victory, rather than a joint victory with the Crusaders. Instead of being fired the proofreader is commissioned to develop the idea into a novel. A study in historical revisionism.

A dramatic and intimate portrait of one of the world's great cities.

Although the Crusades are generally thought of in terms of the European attempt to conquer and colonize the Holy Land, from the twelfth century onward crusading also involved the "reconquest" of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims. This eyewitness account of the capture of Lisbon in 1147 by the combined forces of King Alfonso Henriques of Portugal and a fleet of crusaders from the Anglo-Norman realm, Flanders, and the Rhineland is one of the richest and most exciting sources to survive from this period. Far more than just a narrative, De expugnatione Lyxbonensi vividly conveys the tensions between the secular and spiritual motives of a crusading army, as well as revealing a wealth of information on medieval warfare, the development of crusading ideology and holy war, and Muslim views of the crusaders. The new foreword by Jonathan Phillips provides insight to the latest scholarship on the integral place of the Lisbon expedition in the Second Crusade, the identity of the text's author, and his message for crusaders.

Trapped in his apartment in an immigrant district of Paris, the narrator is far from the high life of museums, elegant restaurants and boutiques. Within this imprisonment, his thoughts oscillate between revolutionary terrorism and pre-pubescent sexuality - a concern he shares with Lewis Carroll. Mirroring the conventions of Arabic texts, Landscapes After the Battle is to be understood from the perspective of its end; an end where the relationship between writer, the reader and the written is revealed as playful and humorous. The appearance of the comic in a novel by Juan Goytisolo is unexpected; like Dracula at a haemophiliacs? convention.

Raimundo Silva es un revisor de textos de una editorial, un personaje anodino que tiene como misión en la vida conservar la integridad de los textos que llegan a sus manos. Un día, revisando un texto histórico, toma una decisión: introducir un "No" donde debiera aparecer un "Sí". Esta determinación altera, sin duda alguna, la historia escrita, pero también va a ser fundamental en su vida personal. El conservador Raimundo Silva no volverá a ser sujeto paciente de la historia, tanto la universal como la personal, porque su acto de rebeldía le hace asumir el protagonismo que, como hombre -y por tanto hegemónico- le corresponde en la vida. --Amazon.com.

The Nobel Prize–winning author of Blindness recalls the days of his youth in Lisbon and the Portuguese countryside in this charming memoir. José 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 José. Small Memories traces the formation of a man who emerged, against all odds, as one of the world’s most respected writers. Shifting between childhood and his teenage years, between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this mosaic of memories looks 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 grandparents bringing the weaker piglets into their bed on cold nights; and Saramago’s early encounters with literature, from teaching himself to read to poring over a Portuguese-French conversation guide, not realizing that he was in fact reading a play by Molière.