Description:

*Manual of Painting and Calligraphy* was José Saramago’s first novel. Written eight years before the critically acclaimed *Baltasar and Blimunda*, it is a story of self-discovery set against the background of the last years of Salazar’s dictatorship. A struggling young artist, commissioned to paint a portrait of an influential industrialist, learns in the process about himself and the world around him. The brilliant juxtaposition of a passionate love story and the crisis of a nation foreshadows all of Saramago’s major works. A must-have for any devotee of the great Portuguese Nobel laureate, *Manual of Painting and Calligraphy* is available in the United States for the first time. ** ### From Booklist Originally published in 1977 and now finally available for the first time in the U.S., the first novel by the Portuguese master (and Nobel laureate) tells the story of a middle-aged portrait painter’s creative and political awakening. H., as our narrator is known, knows the portraits he is commissioned to paint are an artistic failure from the first brushstroke; in them he sees himself “futile, weary, disheartened and lost.” His evenings are a series of hollow sexual conquests that ultimately reinforce his loneliness. But H. begins to emerge from his stagnancy when he discovers that writing—about his travels in Italy, at first—unlocks creative energies that painting cannot. With this realization comes the promise of real romance but also, in the desperate last days of the Salazar autocracy, certain responsibilities. All fiction is biography, Saramago reminds us, and it is indeed tempting to understand H.’s awakening as a depiction of Saramago’s own. But this is Saramago, after all, so even a portrait of the artist as a young man hints at the profound and the universal. --Brendan Driscoll ### Review "For a first novel, though, **this work displays a masterly grasp of wordplay and other literary devices, and as the translator points out, it can also serve as a map to the political and social themes of Saramago’s future novels**." --*Library Journal*