Description
When King and Church exercise absolute power, what happens to the dreams of ordinary people? In early-eighteenth-century Lisbon, Baltasar, a soldier who has lost a hand in battle, falls in love with Blimunda, a young girl with strange visionary powers. From the day that he follows her home from the auto-da-fé where her mother is condemned and sent into exile, the two are bound body and soul by a love of unassailable strength. A third party shares their supper that evening: Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço, whose fantasy is to invent a flying machine. As the Inquisition rages and royalty and religion clash, they pursue his impossible, not to mention heretical, dream of flight.
Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.
Endorsements
“brilliant...enchanting novel” — New York Times Book Review
Recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature — José Saramago