In eighteenth-century Portugal, fifty thousand laborers carry stones on their backs across mountains to build the king's convent, a heretical priest devises a magic flying machine--the Passarola--and two lovers' dream of flight sets them apart
Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago blends fact and fiction in his surreal, ironic, and darkly comic novelistic depiction of 18th-century Portugal. A wounded soldier, Baltasar and his psychic lover Blimunda are recruited by the real-life heretical priest Bartolomeu Lourenco de Gusmao to help him build the world's first airplane. In Saramago's hands, this strange plot becomes a scathing indictment of culture, religion, and politics.
- Genre: Fiction + Literature Themes, Fiction + Literature Genres
- Subgenre: Disasters, Love + Relationships + Sex, Literary Genres + Types of Novels, Literary, Religion + Beliefs, Types of Characters
- Publisher: Mariner Books
- Pages: 343
- Language: English
- Format: paperback
- Release Date: October 16, 1998
- Date Published: October 16, 1998
- Author: Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero