The History of the Siege of Lisbon, a novel by Jose Saramago

Immediately, with the title, the author begins to play with the reader. For The History of the Siege of Lisbon is a novel, not a history book. It questions the nature of history and the relationship of words to truth and reality -- all the big questions in a creative, paradoxical, and philosophically comical style, rather like Borges and Lem, with occasional touches of disproportionate kafkaesque guilt -- at the same time as telling, very delicately and convincingly, the love story of two middle aged underlings at a publishing house in modern day Lisbon.

The main character is a proofreader, who succumbing to an inexplicable urge, changes one word in a history book he is working on. And for a moment, the reader is led to believe that the narrative might take a scifi twist into alternate reality, following all the consequences of the change of that one little word, from "yes" to "no". Then instead, it turns out that the proof-reader will write a novel exploring those consequences, at the behest of his new boss, who was hired as a quality control overseer after his one wild incident of single-word rebellion.

Along the way, we are given not just one view of a crucial moment in the history, when in 1147 with the ousting of the Moors from Lisbon the Portuguese nation was formed. These accounts are all consistent with the fragmentary historical evidence, though only one thread has been sanctioned as "real." And the world created by the meticulous and well-informed proof reader has texture and life and credibility, despite the one twist -- the "no." That was the answer given by the Crusaders who, officially, joined the siege as they happened by Lisbon on the way to the Holy Land and made a crucial difference in the battle, and who in this version decide to leave the pompous ungrateful would-be Portuguese king to handle matters himself. But rather than a tornado of consequence, changing forever all that came after, what we see is leaves twirling in a backyard wind. The changes turn out to be all local -- differences in how the battle is won and who deserves credit, rather than the outcome of the battle. So we see characters challenged and tested, revealing their rough-hewn medieval brand of humanity, and the rip in time closes as if it had never opened. And for all anyone knows, the speculative version created by the proofreader may in fact be closer to what actually happened than the version found in today's textbooks.

Meanwhile, the proof-reader in modern Lisbon in fact lives in a building that dates back to the days of the siege and near where one of the old gates of the city had been, and gets a view from his window that would have been that of a Moor at that time; which makes it easy for his imagination to slip from the one time frame to another.

And he creates a love story in his fiction, which vaguely parallels his own love story, which unfolds during the writing of the book, with the woman who had asked him to write it.

Miraculously and deftly, the author turns what at times threatens to be an intriguing but academic discourse on history, fiction, truth, and reality, into an entertaining and sympathetic double love story that plays itself out in the same city, but separated by 850 years. Yet, even as you get involved in the story, he reminds you again and again, with the structure of his narrative, that something very strange is going on here. The author of the history book was not to be trusted, because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence he based his account on, and because of the rumor-like nature of the writing of history -- historians perpetually repeating the mistakes of those who came before them. Nor is the proof-reader to be trusted, despite his passion for detail, and his apparently intimate knowledge of both the historical facts and the human nature behind them. In fact, the narrator goes out of his way, near the very beginning, to undermine the proof-reader's credibility by giving examples of his mistakes and limited understanding. And the narrator himself does not present himself as infallible. No facts can be known with certainly -- even down to the level of punctuation and paragraph structure, which is idiosyncratic, and deliberately ambiguous. There are no quotation marks to show where speech begins and ends. Rather when someone is speaking, sentences end with commas, instead of periods -- which strangely and unexpectedly is far more natural and readable that it sounds. It seems that the author is refusing to draw anything with sharp outlines and edges. One narrative fades into another, just as one time period fades into another and back again, informing, while at the same time continually raising doubt about what is "real" or "true."

But in this book, facts don't seem to be terribly important -- certainly not as important as they are usually represented to be. One gets the sense that there are a few fixed or reasonably well known points along a time line, and there are numerous possible story-paths from the one point to another, all of which are equally valid, because they lead to the same conclusion, and by looking at more than one possible path, you come to know the characters and their circumstances far better, with all the texture and shading of reality, with its dynamic tensions and ever-changing possibilities, than in the usual static, linear historical narrative.

Basically, the story is told so well that you can forget all the philosophical and stylistic paraphenalia and just enjoy the love stories. The muted, but very credible emotion reminds me of Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban. And the inner view of the unfolding, evolving feelings of a meek underling call to mind Dostoyevsky. Rare, indeed, is the writer who can totally involve the reader without concocting wild and extraordinary events, who can make everyday people show their heroic and passionate potential in everyday circumstances.

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