"e;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 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..."e; 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.
"Saramago writes possibly the most beautiful but certainly the most precise and differentiated Portuguese prose of our time"
WALTER HAUBRICH, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"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 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.
"Saramago is a writer of formidable talent and extraordinary imagination"
La Repubblica, Milan
"He is one of the rare contemporary novelists who works out his text as a veritable narrative mechanism: the carefully planned , somewhat complex architecture of his books gives them the tautness found in the best mystery novels, whose construction is of course their determining factor"
Liberation, Paris
"To speak of novels of Jose Saramago is to speak of the sheer pleasure of reading"
O Diario, Lisbon
