Journey To Portugal

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“A journey is a matter more of being than of moving on” The traveller, José Saramago, alone in his veteran motor car, scours his native land from northeast to southwest with the innocent eye of a stranger, discovering in himself the concordances and the dissonances that bind him to his land and people. Assiduous, indeed meticulous, in his attention to all that he sees, whether his quest is an inaccessible mediaeval fortress on a crag, or a grand urban mansion, the traveller in the course of his journey unlocks a thousand memories – of kings, warriors, painters, explorers, writers, saints and sinners. But what gives the entire extended journey its strong sense of unity is the personality of the author/traveller: if a good meal and glass of wine after an arduous drive through misty mountains leaves him genial and light-hearted, nothing is better calculated to turn him tetchy and morose than being greeted in English by an Algarve hotelier – his moods change as his encounters, and the vagaries of the Portuguese weather, dictate. The reader, following long to explore the glories and the hidden treasures of the country, is inevitably drawn to the conclusion that José Saramago is as stimulating and delightful a travelling companion as one could wish for. Much of what the traveller saw is laid before the reader in a gallery of photographs, which includes ones commissioned for this edition.

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Jose Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922 and has been a full-time writer since 1979. His oeuvre embraces plays, poetry, short stories, non-fiction and ten novels, which have been translated into more than forty languages and have established him as the most influential Portuguese writer of his generation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.