Search

A proofreader realizes his power to edit the truth on a whim, in a “brilliantly original” novel by a Nobel Prize winner (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Raimundo Silva is a middle-aged, celibate clerk, proofing manuscripts for a respectable publishing house. Fluent in Portuguese, he has been assigned to work on a standard history of the country, and the twelfth-century king who laid siege to Lisbon. In a moment of subversive daring, Raimundo decides to change just one single word of text—a capricious revision that completely undoes the past. When discovered, his insolent disregard for facts appalls his employers—save for his new editor, Maria Sara. She suggests that Rainmundo take his transgressions even further. Through Rainmundo and Maria’s eyes, what transpires is an alternate view of history and a colorful reinvention of a debatable truth. It’s a serpentine journey through time where past and present converge, fact becomes myth, and fiction and reality blur—especially for Rainmundo and Maria themselves, who begin to find themselves erotically drawn to each other. “Walter Mitty has nothing on Raimundo Silva . . . this hypnotic tale is a great comic romp through history, language and the imagination.” —Publishers Weekly Translated by Giovanni Pontiero

A fiction novel based in real facts in the years 193740 when Adolph Hitler tried to obtain the cooperation of the ex-British king Edward VIII, then Duke of Windsor, to return back to the British throne after the Nazi occupation. Action following the movements of the Duke and Mrs. Wallis Simpson through German, France, Spain, and Portugal, during the Nazi regime, occupied France, and the Salazar and Franco fascist regimes. Details about the period when the Duke was hosted in Cascais, near Lisbon, in a villa of a Portuguese banker with deep relationships with Hitler regime; the role of Winston Churchill in the resistance to the German ambitions and the behavior of the Duke; the collaboration between the diplomatic and uncovered British resistance in Portugal, and the uncovered Portuguese resistanceeverything under an environment of espionage and conspiracy, and of love, in war times. A journalist and writer, sixty-three years old, and a professional career for over forty years. A journalist of investigation and an expert on international and diplomatic affairs. He covered a lot of the main world facts in the last quarter of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century: wars and peace processes in Middle East, North and South of Africa, Balkans, and Eastern Europe. A director of Portuguese newspapers and magazines, an invited analyst on international and diplomatic affairs in Portuguese TV and radio networksRadio France International and BBC World (Portuguese Section). An author of a few books about the War on Lebanon (1982), investigation about Mafia, and the fall of Ambrosian Bank in connection with Vatican Bank (1986), and the crises of 2011. This is his first novel.

"Short stories (fiction) by the great nineteenth-century Portuguese author Jose Maria Eca de Queiros; a variety of themes characterize the stories: love, greed, obsession, country life; patriotism"--