This book took more time than usual for me to read. The problem with Saramago's book, at least for me, is that it requires good stretches of uninterrupted attention, something which has been a sparse thing these days. But I finally finished it today.

Saramago is up to his typical mischievousness here, lobbing another "what if"? The man's imagination is as boundless as his knowledge and wonder. The plot of this story hinges on a moment of whimsy on the part of a very ordinary, unwhimsical, unobtrusive and unassuming proofreader for a prestigious Lisbon publishing firm. While Raimundo Silva is proofing a manuscript on The History of the Siege of Lisbon, for reasons that Raimundo is later at a loss to explain, he adds the word "not" to a sentence that had originally stated that the crusaders had agreed to help the Portuguese in their siege of the Moor-held city of Lisbon. He is forgiven his moment of indiscretion, but a new position, a manager of proofreaders, is created to prevent future problems. Dr. Maria Sara is the woman hired, Raimundo's new boss. She presents two challenges for him, one to write this alternative history he has suggested by his impulsive editing; and a second, love.

As stepped, maze-like and rambling as the streets of Old Lisbon, the plot makes changes in time, verb tense and focus, which combined with Saramago's nontraditional approach to punctuation, creates a hurdy-gurdy world, which if to one's liking, is mesmerizing. Once when a friend called and wondered what I was doing, I told her "I was wasting away in Saramagoville" The author challenges our ideas of knowledge, history, historiography, human nature, language, love and the language of love. And there are the miracles; the recounting of the Miracles of St. Anthony, the Miracles of the holy knight, the miracles of love. Raimundo is very much an alter-ego for Saramago, and Raimundo's Maria Sara is Pilar, and both have alter-egos within Raimundo's story. There are times when identities, just as when standing on the balcony of Raimundo's apartment which is on the verge of Moorish Lisbon, Maria Sara askes would they have been Moors or Portuguese if it was the time of the siege. Neither is really sure. With his expansive library, Raimundo suggest they could look it up, but could the believe the answer?

The last paragraph is incandescently beautiful, but the beauty would not be there unless one muddled ones way to it. To give this book a fair shot, if one is considering reading it, read it when chunks time can be devoted to it.

This is now my most dog-eared book since as I read there would be one wry or profound insight after another. Since I did not want to lose my rhythm I stopped jotting them down and started dog-earring, something I never, never do. Yet with Saramago one can never say never

Promises Borges-like goings on and then doesn't deliver. ( )

Raimundo Silva is a long-time proof-reader for a local press in Lisbon. He is proofing a scholarly history of the siege of Lisbon in 1147 in which the Christians eventually won the town back from the Moors who had held it for three centuries. The story itself is classic Portuguese history, known by school children. Basically it is that the Portuguese were sieving the city and enlisted the aid of Crusaders who were on their way to the holy land. There was a famous speech given by the Portuguese king, Dom Afonso Henriques, in which he made his case for the Crusaders to join their efforts. Afterward comes the important and well-known line of the story in which the Crusaders said they would help the Portuguese. For reasons he simply cannot yet know, the proof-reader inserts a NOT. The Crusaders will not help the Portuguese.
This "not" is in some sense the driving word of the entire novel. But in other senses it is not. Certain parts of the causal train of the story follow the "not". Raimundo Silva turns in this amended version, it gets printed, but is discovered before general circulation. An erratum is inserted telling readers a mistake has been made; the author isn't much concerned with the small mistake (no doubt in part since most readers will already know THAT part of the story), and even the publishers are lenient in dealing with what they realize was conscious vandalism of the text. All would end at this point were that "not" the whole story.
What complicates things and provides us fans of Jose Saramago with a simply astonishing novel, are the complexities that flow around the edges of the "not," not directly from it. As he did in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and in The Stone Raft, Saramago plays with counterfactual causalities, with worlds of what if and why not. Perhaps the central puzzle that gets raised in the novel is the question of how much historical truth can we have to begin with? How much is lost to us of the past simply because it was never recorded. How much was recorded, but then the records themselves later lost or ignored? How much gets selected out and not noticed or never even found by the historians bringing particular events and periods to our attention? These things worry Saramago, and he humbles us with his explorations into counterfactual history, especially since he makes the case that the so-called counterfactuals may well turn out to be the real history after all.
Even bigger fish are at stake. As in The Stone Raft, Saramago seems to argue here that we are locked into a certain notion of causality, certain rules of our limited science which simply may not get at reality at all. In the current story the publishers, only partially in reaction to Raimundo Silva's purposeful insertion of the "not," have hired a new administrator in charge of the proof-readers. She has come aboard just at the time of the discovery of Silva's "not" and is a bit amused by it, even intrigued. She challenges him to write the story of the siege from the point of view of this not, which Silva does, and in the process the two fall in love. At one point late in the novel Saramago, or at least the omniscient narrator, says that the real cause of the "not" was to create this love relationship between Maria Sara and Raimundo Silva, and even more complicated, it is a long affair that is closely modeled on the fictional one which Silva creates in his knowingly fictional recreation of the history of the siege. Things get complicated for the standard logics of writing history.
From the outset the novel operates on two main levels: a dialectic between the present time, centered around the life, work and love life of Raimundo Silva and the siege of Lisbon in 1147. The difficulty is that causal relationships work in both directions. The siege was what the siege was, but the siege we have at our disposal, our ONLY siege (or sieges) is that which the historians give us. Raimundo Silva participates in this "giving" by creating his alternative history of the siege, except that he knows his siege is purely fictional. This fact doesn't keep his siege, even the "other" siege from creating his own life in the present, especially his love relationship with Maria Sara, and, curiously, is itself the very cause of that relationship.
Another part of the brilliance of this novel is how it is that Silva creates his alternative history. He lets the logic of the "not" have its way and simply follows it. There are limits. The siege of Lisbon succeeded. That was not part of his "not." He merely rejected the fact that the Crusaders joined the Portuguese in the siege. This presents, then, the two key difficulties: why would the Crusaders have said no, and what is a plausible account of how the Portuguese could have won this battle without the Crusaders, who would not only have constituted 50% of their force, but would have been the 50% with the best fighting ability and experience. Raimundo Silva has certain historical facts he simply must accept and follow, he has not rejected everything, just this one particular famous historical "yes."