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. When King and Church exercise absolute power what happens to the dreams of ordinary people? In early eighteenth century Lisbon, Baltasar, a soldier who has lost a hand in battle, falls in love with Blimunda, a young girl with strange visionary powers. From the day that he follows her home from the auto-da-fé where her mother is condemned and sent into exile, the two are bound body and soul by a love of unassailable strength. A third party shares their supper that evening: Padre Bartolemeu Lourenço, whose fantasy is to invent a flying machine. As the inquisition rages and royalty and religion clash, they pursue his impossible, not to mention heretical, dream of flight.
Author
Novels of especially noted Portuguese writer José Saramago, include Country of Sin (1947) and The Stone Raft (1986); people awarded him the Nobel Prize of 1998 for literature. The most important among nations of the last century, he in his sixties then came to prominence with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda . A huge body of work followed, translated into more than forty languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%...
