Raised from the Ground - Hardcover

Saramago, Jose

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 015101325X ISBN 13: 9780151013258

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Synopsis

A multigenerational family saga that paints a sweeping portrait of twentieth-century Portugal

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.

Finally available in English, 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 work.

About this title

Review:

"Time now gives us English-speakers the chance to see how well he worked to serve and deserve such greatness in this early novel" (Ursula K Le Guin Guardian)

"Here Saramago has begun to develop a unique voice which swoops and dives on his own work like a bird (and which is captured with all the skill of a ventriloquist in Margaret Jull Costa’s excellent translation)" (Nick Caistor Times Literary Supplement)

"By Saramago’s own reckoning it was the book in which he found and developed his style... a novel that resounds with relevance for our own time" (Steven Heighton Scotsman)

"This is a rich novel about a family of landless agricultural workers struggling over four generations... Readers of José Saramago will not be surprised at this original combination of serious denunciation of injustice with sarcasm and humour... Such an allusive novel, with its own orthodoxy in punctuation and subtle shifts of tone, is especially hard to translate. It reads beautifully well" (Michael Eaude Independent)

"A torrent of storytelling delivered with a lively, humorous immediacy, where his narrative drive and digressive thoughts flow unimpeded by conventional punctuation restraints" (Siobhan Murphy Metro)

Book Description:

This previously unpublished early novel by the major Portuguese writer José Saramago tells the powerful story of the Mau-Tempo family as, against the backdrop of the First and Second World Wars, they suffer and strive for something better in the harsh society of rural Portugal

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 015101325X
• ISBN 13: 9780151013258
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 365