proof-reader Raimundo Silva not only rewrites an important chapter of Portuguese history but in the process irrevocably transforms his own life. This
The book operates on two planes of action: one set in the twelfth century, packed with key episodes of the alternative history of the siege of Lisbon the proof-reader Raimundo Silva feels compelled to write; the other in the twentieth century, dealing with the routine existence of the proof-reader's daily life and a significant encounter with a new editor who challenges him to justify his radical departure from established historiography. Raimundo Silva who dominates the novel could be the alter ego of Saramago who refuses to accept history as it is traditionally presented and speculates about the gaps left in historical records which historians frequently gloss over with questionable theories and hypotheses. By placing real people into such historical lacunae, Saramago attempts to fill these voids more plausibly and in keeping with the modern reader's expectation of historical verisimilitude. Thus when the proof-reader Raimundo Silva starts writing the alternative history of the reconquest of Lisbon, he emulates Saramago's technique of placing human experience against a historical background, in other words, he tries to write a hybrid narrative embodying past events and contemporary reactions to another age so remote yet tangibly present.
In the pursuit of this parallel plot, Saramago raises a number of issues which are also a central concern in many of his other books. How reliable are historical sources, and how trustworthy are historians in dealing with uncertainties, improbabilities and the gaps or lacunae? How are we to interpret speeches allegedly made by historical characters? What can we know about the private emotions of the people who make these speeches and those who record them with varying degrees of accuracy? All these questions are discussed in the form of a series of dialogues. The dialogue between the proof-reader and the author reveals once more Saramago's iconoclastic attitude to history. For Saramago, historiography itself is fiction for it results from a selection of facts coherently organised, leaving forgotten or committing to oblivion many other facts which, had they been taken into consideration, would have given a different shape to the same history. This attitude is further illustrated in the dialogues the proof-reader has with his alter ego, the witness of human adventures during the siege of Lisbon, and with his editor, Maria Sara, who provides the challenge that motivates him to try his hand at writing his own history. Placing the main action within present-day Lisbon, Saramago removes the novel from the genre of historical narrative while providing a platform for reflections on the art of reconstructing the past and the difference between writing history and fiction.
As in his other novels, Saramago's paragraph-long sentences, minimally interrupted by punctuation, challenge the reader to follow his continuous stream of thought, thus permitting a stronger sense of interaction and a more diverse interpretation of phrases and clauses. Keen that his reader should move easily back and forth between the present, the recorded and the imagined past, in this novel Saramago also freely shifts between past and present tenses, conveying the impression of the timelessness of the human imagination. This temporal fluidity is further emphasised by the strategic location of the proof-reader's flat within the precinct of the old Moorish fortress, a kind of watchtower from where the perception of past and present alternate according to the proof-reader's mood.
Beneath these speculations about the function and form of historical writing, we discover that the central concerns of Saramago's novel focus on our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, to differentiate between reliable and suspect historical reporting, and the difficulty of drawing the frontier between the two, or in Saramago's own words: 'The truth is that history could have been written in many different ways and this idea of infinitude and variation are the essence of my writing. The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.'
