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Saramago, Jose (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa) : The Cave

Harcourt Inc., New York City, NY, 2002

ISBN 0151004145

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 307 pages. The author's eighth novel to be translated into English. One of Jose Saramago's finest achievements. The first appearance of the title in English and in the United States. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Jose Saramago's "A Caverna" in a felicitous English translation. "A compassionate study of loyalty, love, and the ways in which people face the forces trying to obliterate their spirit" (Francine Prose). Saramago re-visits and re-examines "the human condition", that otherwise exhausted inheritance from the idea and the reality called Europe, and sees it with fresh eyes through the prism of Apocalypse/"The End". He revitalizes and enlarges the novel through allegory. Often described as a satirist, Saramago's work goes much deeper, and he is perhaps the greatest modern literary ironist since Franz Kafka. An important distinction: A satirist mocks, makes fun of, and laughs at others; an ironist mocks, makes fun of, and laughs at himself, that is, makes us laugh at his pain. Saramago was an anomaly who came out of nowhere, seemingly born a genius. Every single page of every single book he has ever written makes the reader feel that he or she is in the hands of an unsurpassable Master. An absolute "must-have" title for Jose Saramago collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed and dated in black ink-pen on the title page by the author: "Jose Saramago 1.2006". It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a great book. This is one of few such signed copies of the First American Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. Please note: Among Nobel Laureates, Saramago's signature was the most difficult to get because he rarely left Lanzarote, the island he moved to at the height of his fame. Signed copies of his books remain under-priced as compared to those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Cormac McCarthy. Saramago will be regarded by posterity as a greater writer than both of them, and there is no British or American novelist of the last fifty years, living or dead, who comes close to Saramago's achievement. A rare signed copy thus. Regarded by Harold Bloom as one of the two greatest novelists of our time (the other being Philip Roth), Jose Saramago will be read as probably the greatest European novelist of the last fifty years. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. A fine collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER JOSE SARAMAGO TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0151004145.

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