Book description
'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.
José Saramago is one of the most important international writers of
the
last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922 in the small rural village
of Azinhaga, he was in his fifties when he came to prominence as a
writer with the publication of
Baltasar and Blimunda
. A huge body of work followed, which included plays, poetry, short
stories, non-fiction and over a dozen novels, translated into more than
forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature. He died in June 2010.
