Tale of the Unknown Island - Hardcover

Jose Saramago

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151005958 ISBN 13: 9780151005956

Publisher: Harcourt Brace International, 1999

Synopsis

A man went to knock at the king's door and said to him, 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 favors (favors being done 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 the reader will discover as this short narrative unfolds. And at the end it will be clear that if we thought we were reading a children's fable we were wrong-we have been reading a love story and a philosophical tale worthy of Voltaire or Swift.

About this title

Review:

"Saramago writes possibly the most beautiful but certainly the most precise and differentiated Portuguese prose of our time" (Walter Haubrich Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

"Saramago is a writer, like Faulkner, so confident of his resources and ultimate destination that he can bring any improbability to life" (John Updike)

"No candidate for a Nobel Prize has a better claim to lasting recognition than this novelist" (Edmund White)

"He was the equal of Philip Roth, Günter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile - he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy" (Harold Bloom)

"Saramago is a writer of formidable talent and extraordinary imagination" (La Repubblica)

Book Description:

A wonderful and witty book, part folk fable, part philosophical tale, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature and the greatest Portuguese writer of his time.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt Brace International
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0151005958
• ISBN 13: 9780151005956
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 64