SOURCE: "Fueling the Passarola," in New York Times, November 1, 1987, Sec. 7, p. 7.

[In the following review, Howe finds Baltasar and Blimunda a complex and engaging story.]

The most vigorous writing of recent years has come not from the great powers of the West but from small, impoverished and sometimes "backward" countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe and parts of Africa. As if to confirm this trend, there has now arrived from Portugal a brilliant novel by Jose Saramago, a writer who is highly regarded in Portuguese-speaking countries but little known elsewhere. This injustice should speedily be corrected with Giovanni Pontiero's translation, at once idiomatic and elegant, of Baltasar and Blimunda. And apart from its strong intrinsic interest, this novel should help put to rest the notion recently expressed in these and other pages that living in the wake of the heroic period of literary modernism dooms us to a...