Baltasar and Blimunda

Baltasar, Blimunda, and the Flying Machine

The novel opens with an auto-da-fé—a public spectacle of Inquisitorial justice in Lisbon in 1711—and it is here that Baltasar Sete-Sóis, a soldier who lost his left hand in the wars with Spain, first sees Blimunda. She is standing in the crowd watching her mother be sentenced to exile. They find each other afterward, begin living together, and form what becomes one of the great love partnerships in European fiction: not romantic in the sentimental sense, but practical, loyal, and genuinely mutual in a society that offers women almost nothing.

Blimunda’s gift is her second sight: when she fasts, she can see inside human bodies—the organs, the bones, the wills of people as they drift loose at the moment of sleep. This ability becomes the magical engine of the novel’s central subplot. Father Bartolomeu de Gusmão, a real historical figure who was indeed obsessed with flight, recruits Baltasar and Blimunda to help him build a flying machine—a great sphere of amber and iron and sail—powered by the wills that Blimunda collects from sleeping bodies in vials. The machine actually flies, briefly and privately, over the Portuguese countryside. Saramago presents this miracle with complete matter-of-factness, embedding it in the texture of historical description so that the supernatural and the real become indistinguishable.

Running alongside the love story and the flying machine is the construction of the Mafra Convent, the vast baroque monument that King João V ordered built to fulfil a vow. Tens of thousands of labourers were conscripted to build it; the novel tracks their suffering alongside the royal grandeur. Baltasar works on the convent’s construction, which is how Saramago connects the intimate story of the central couple to the vast, indifferent machinery of royal and ecclesiastical power.

History from Below

Saramago’s great subject is the history of those who do not appear in official history—the labourers, the soldiers’ wives, the Inquisition’s lesser victims—and Baltasar and Blimunda is his fullest account of this counterhistory. King João V appears in the novel but is rendered with gentle mockery: a man so convinced of his divine mandate that his vanities and appetites are simply a more elaborate version of everyone else’s. The thousands of workers who build his convent are rendered with the opposite attention: their exhaustion, their injuries, the distances they walk, the amount of stone they move are described with the documentary precision of someone who has read the actual records and wants you to feel the accumulated weight.

The political implications are clear and consistent with Saramago’s lifelong communism, but they never become didactic. The novel works as story first. Saramago’s method—the long undivided paragraphs, the dialogue embedded in the prose without quotation marks, the narrator who steps forward to editorialize and then steps back—creates a sense of history as something lived by everyone simultaneously, kings and labourers and lovers all caught in the same irresistible flow.

The comparison to García Márquez is obvious and was made at the time of publication. Both writers use magical realism to tell the history of regions that official historiography has simplified or romanticized, both are concerned with the gap between power and the people it acts upon, and both find in the persistence of love and the body a kind of counterweight to the catastrophe of history. But Saramago is less exuberant and more melancholy than García Márquez; his magical elements are quieter, more functional, less carnivalesque. The flying machine is not a wonder for its own sake but an emblem of human aspiration measured against what institutions will actually permit.

Reading Saramago

Baltasar and Blimunda was published in Portugal in 1982 and is generally considered Saramago’s first major novel—the book that announced what he could do, before The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) and Blindness (1995) brought him international recognition and, in 1998, the Nobel Prize. It is therefore both historically important in his career and, for most readers, the best place to begin. Blindness is more famous and more frequently assigned, but it is also more brutal and more relentlessly allegorical. Baltasar and Blimunda gives you the full Saramago method—the prose style, the historical imagination, the political consciousness—in a warmer, more emotionally generous form.

The prose style does require adjustment. Saramago uses minimal punctuation: long sentences linked by commas rather than periods, dialogue without quotation marks or dialogue tags (speakers are identified by context and capitalization), paragraphs that run for pages. This is not carelessness but a considered formal choice: the flow mimics the way history actually moves, without clean breaks, without moments where one thing stops and another begins. Most readers adjust within thirty pages.

Giovanni Pontiero’s translation for Harvest Books captures the rhythm of Saramago’s Portuguese well. The novel was later retranslated by Margaret Jull Costa, who handles Saramago’s other major works; either edition serves. For those who want to continue after Baltasar and Blimunda, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is the natural next step: it has the same historical scope and the same interest in the human cost of divine or institutional authority, but directed at a story familiar enough to make the departures immediately legible.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Saramago’s most romantic novel and his best entry point: a love story set against the Inquisition, the building of a baroque convent, and a flying machine powered by human wills, written with the historical authority and gentle political anger that define his Nobel-winning body of work.