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Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his daughter Marta
and her husband Marcal in a small village on the outskirts of The
Center, an imposing complex of shops, apartments, and offices to
which Cipriano delivers his pots and jugs every month. On one such
trip, he is told not to make any more deliveries. Unwilling to give
up his craft, Cipriano tries his hand at making ceramic dolls.
Astonishingly, The Center places an order for hundreds, and
Cipriano and Marta set to work-until the order is cancelled and the
three have to move from the village into The Center. When
mysterious sounds of digging emerge from beneath their apartment,
Cipriano and Marcal investigate, and what they find transforms the
family's life. Filled with the depth, humor, and the extraordinary
philosophical richness that marks each of Saramago's novels, The
Cave is one of the essential books of our time.
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?
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Seeing (Paperback)
Jose Saramago
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R442
R370
Discovery Miles 3 700
Save R72 (16%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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. 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. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even
blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of
blindness that hit the city four years before, and of the one woman
who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? 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.
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The Silence Of Water (Hardcover)
Jose Saramago; Illustrated by Yolanda Mosquera; Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
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R485
R400
Discovery Miles 4 000
Save R85 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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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.
"Essential...A novel that resounds with relevance for our own
time." --"New York Times Book Review" First published in 1980, the
City of Lisbon Prize-winning "Raised from the Ground" follows the
changing fortunes of the Mau Tempo family--poor landless peasants
not unlike Saramago's own grandparents. Set in Alentejo, a southern
province of Portugal known for its vast agricultural estates, the
novel charts the lives of the Mau Tempos as national and
international events rumble on in the background--the coming of the
republic in Portugual, the two world wars, and an attempt on the
dictator Salazar's life. Yet nothing really impinges on the grim
reality of the farm laborers' lives until the first communist
stirrings.
"Raised from the Ground" is Saramago's most deeply personal
novel, the book in which he found the signature style and voice
that distinguishes all of his brilliant works.
Yitzhak Laor is one of Israel's most prominent dissidents and
poets, a latter-day Spinoza who helps keep alive the critical
tradition within Jewish culture. In this work he fearlessly
dissects the complex attitudes of Western European liberal Left
intellectuals toward Israel, Zionism and the "Israeli peace camp."
He argues that through a prism of famous writers like Amos Oz,
David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, the peace camp has now adopted
the European vision of "new Zionism," promoting the fierce Israeli
desire to be accepted as part of the West and taking advantage of
growing Islamophobia across Europe. The backdrop to this uneasy
relationship is the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust. Laor is
merciless as he strips bare the hypocrisies and unarticulated
fantasies that lie beneath the love affair between "liberal
Zionists" and their European supporters.
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Death at Intervals (Paperback)
Jose Saramago; Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
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R310
R252
Discovery Miles 2 520
Save R58 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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In an unnamed country, on the first day of the New Year, people
stop dying. There is great celebration and people dance in the
streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal
life. Soon, though, the residents begin to suffer. Undertakers face
bankruptcy, the church is forced to reinvent its doctrine, and
local 'maphia' smuggle those on the brink of death over the border
where they can expire naturally. Death does return eventually, but
with a new, courteous approach - delivering violet warning letters
to her victims. But what can death do when a letter is unexpectedly
returned?
For two years Solomon the elephant has lived in Lisbon. Now King
Dom Joao III wishes to make him a wedding gift for a Hapsburg
archduke in Vienna. The only way for Solomon to get to his new home
is to walk. So begins a journey that will take the stalwart
elephant across the dusty plains of Castile, over the sea to Genoa
and up to northern Italy where, like Hannibal's elephants before
him, he must cross the snowy Alps. Based on a true story,
Saramago's tale is an enchanting mix of fact, fable and fantasy.
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The Lizard (Hardcover)
Jose Saramago; Translated by Nick Caistor, Lucia Caistor-Arenda
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R440
R360
Discovery Miles 3 600
Save R80 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Blindness (Paperback)
Jose Saramago
1
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R312
R255
Discovery Miles 2 550
Save R57 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order. Discover
a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of
Europe's greatest writers. A driver waiting at the traffic lights
goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive
white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.
It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to
stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental
asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire
destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links
with a supposedly civilised society are snapped. This is not
anarchy, this is blindness. 'Saramago repeatedly undertakes to
unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision
of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic,
version of that project yet' Independent
Senhor José is a minor official in a registry office. He lives alone and spends his days in the documentation of the bare essentials – birth, marriage and death – of the lives of people he doesn’t know. By chance he comes across a woman’s file, in which her date and place of birth are not recorded, and his ordered, restricted life is turned upside down. Determined to discover more about the woman, he breaches all the regulations which have previously ruled his life. His quest becomes an obsession and gives a new meaning to his life yet his attempt to play God with other peoples’ lives is destined to create new mysteries and complexities. In Senhor José, drawn from isolation into contact with the messy realities of human relationships, Saramago has created one of his most memorable characters and All the Names is one of his most subtle and engaging novels.
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Seeing (Paperback)
Jose Saramago; Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
1
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R240
R207
Discovery Miles 2 070
Save R33 (14%)
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Ships in 5 - 10 working days
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Despite the heavy rain, the officer at Polling Station 14 finds it
odd that by midday on National Election day, only a handful of
voters have turned out. Puzzlement swiftly escalates to shock when
the final count reveals seventy per cent of the votes are blank.
National law decrees the election should be repeated but the result
is even worse. The authorities, seized with panic, decamp from the
capital and declare a state of emergency. When apathy and
disillusionment renders an entire democratic system useless what
happens next?
Saramago’s narrative is a secular re-telling of the Gospel, following the life of Christ from his conception to his crucifixion. A naïve Jesus is the son, not of God, but of Joseph who is chosen to lay down his life for man. In the desert it is not Satan but God that Christ tussles with, an autocrat with whom he has an unbalanced and unsettled relationship. In a contemporary twist, Jesus carries with him his father’s guilt for saving his only child from Herod’s Murder of the Innocents. Saramago presents a Jesus who appreciates the ordinary joys and virtues of human life – family, friendship, love – and who struggles to reconcile these earthly virtues with the desires of God and the consequences of his destiny. By subverting the gospels, Saramago has written a dark and provoking parable, an idiosyncratic, satirical and humane investigation into the origins of Christianity.
A wry, fictional account of the life of Christ by the Winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature, "Illuminated by ferocious wit, gentle
passion, and poetry" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). For Jose
Saramago, the life of Jesus Christ and the story of his Passion
were 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 Holy Family
reflects the real complexities of any family, but this is realism
filled with vision, dream, and omen. Saramago's deft psychological
portrait of a savior who is at once the Son of God and a young man
of this earth is an expert interweaving of poetry and irony,
spirituality and irreverence. The result is nothing less than a
brilliant skeptic's wry inquest into the meaning of God and of
human existence.
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 glasses, 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.
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Cain (Paperback)
Jose Saramago; Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
1
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R457
R395
Discovery Miles 3 950
Save R62 (14%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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"Saramago juxtaposes an eminently readable narrative of work and
poverty, class and desire, knowledge and timelessness--one in which
God, too, as he faces Cain in the wake of Noah's Ark, emerges as
far more human than expected." --"San Francisco Chronicle"
In this, his last novel, Jose Saramago daringly reimagines the
characters and narratives of the Old Testament, recalling his
provocative "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ." His tale runs
from the Garden of Eden, when God realizes he has forgotten to give
Adam and Eve the gift of speech, to the moment when Noah's Ark
lands on the dry peak of Ararat. Cain, the despised, the murderer,
is Saramago's protagonist.
Condemned to wander forever after he kills his brother Abel, Cain
makes his way through the world in the company of a personable
donkey. He is a witness to and participant in the stories of Isaac
and Abraham, the destruction of the Tower of Babel, Moses and the
golden calf, the trials of Job. The rapacious Queen Lilith takes
him as her lover. An old man with two sheep on a rope crosses his
path. And again and again, Cain encounters a God whose actions seem
callous, cruel, and unjust. He confronts Him, he argues with Him.
"And one thing we know for certain," Saramago writes, "is that they
continued to argue and are arguing still."
A startling book--sensual, funny--and in all ways a fitting end to
Saramago's extraordinary career.
"A winkingly blasphemous retelling of the Old Testament . . .
Saramago, playfully stretching his chatty late style, pokes holes
in the stated logic of the Biblical God throughout the novel."
--"The New Yorker"
"Small Memories is a . . . nourishing last gift from a great
writer."--"Washington Post"
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 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 Moliere.
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 who emerged, against all odds, as one of
the world's most respected writers.
"Like a nostalgic progenitor bestowing his wealth of life
experience upon a younger generation, Saramago digs deep into his
peasant roots to sketch a rough outline of the little boy who would
become one of the greatest Portuguese-language writers"--"Portland
Oregonian"
"A man went to knock at the king's door and said, 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 favours (favours being offered 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 and
what cargo it was found to be carrying the reader will discover as
this short narrative unfolds. And at the end it will be clear that
what night appear to be a children's fable is in fact a wry, witty
Philosophical Tale that would not have displeased Voltaire or
Swift.
Watching a rented video, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is shocked to
notice that one of the actors is identical to him in every physical
detail. He embarks on a secret quest to find his double and sets in
motion a train of events that he cannot control. Saramago's novel
explores the nature of individuality and examines the fear and
insecurity that arise when our singularity comes under threat, when
even a wife cannot tell the original from the imposter...
Senhor Jose 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 routine. But one day, when he comes across the records of an
anonymous young woman, something happens to him. Obsessed, Senhor
Jose sets off to follow the thread that may lead him to the
woman-but as he gets closer, he discovers more about her, and about
himself, than he would ever have wished.
The loneliness of people's lives, the effects of chance, the
discovery of love-all coalesce in this extraordinary novel that
displays the power and art of Jose Saramago in brilliant form.
Cipriano Algor, an ageing potter, lives with his daughter and her husband in the shadow of the Centre, a nebulous, constantly expanding conglomerate that provides his livelihood - until it decrees that it is no longer interested in his humble wares. Together with his daughter, they craft a new line of small ceramic figurines and, to their bafflement, the Centre orders vast quantities. But once the figures are complete, the Centre recants: there is no market for them. Resigned to idleness Cipriano moves into the soulless megaplex, until late one night he comes across a horrifying secret in the bowels of the artificial city. The Cave is a harrowing, joyful masterpiece: an Orwellian nightmare, a family fable and an uplifting love story.
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Cain (Paperback)
Jose Saramago; Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
1
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R305
R247
Discovery Miles 2 470
Save R58 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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After killing his brother Abel, Cain must wander for ever. He
witnesses Noah's ark, the destruction of the Tower of Babel, Moses
and the golden calf. He is there in time to save Abraham from
sacrificing Isaac when God's angel arrives late after a wing
malfunction. Written in the last years of Saramago's life, Cain
wittily tackles many of the moral and logical non sequiturs created
by a wilful, authoritarian God, forming part of Saramago's long
argument with God and recalling his provocative novel The Gospel
According to Jesus Christ.
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