Harcourt, Inc., 2000. Uncorrected Proof in Near Fine condition.  ages. SIGNED on the half title page by Jose Saramago.  Presents Jose Saramago's "Viagem a Portugal", his unique and unsurpassable valentine to his native land, beautifully interspersed with black-and-white photographs. "Pursues the nation's culture and history, but as only the living eminence of that culture could seek it. Saramago sees through the eye, not with it. He gives us the spiritual form of Portugal: A compound of culture and history with what only the inner eye can behold. To see so much, and so well, is to anticipate the terrors and yet also the dignity of loss. Saramago will be a permanent part of the Western canon. In all of his wonderful meditations upon the ruefulness of life, there is always a spirit of laughter beckoning us in the art of somehow going on. His achievement is one of the enlargements of life" (Harold Bloom). Among the Nobel Laureates and other great writers of our time, Saramago's signature was probably the most difficult to get because he rarely left Lanzarote, the island he moved to at the height of his fame. 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.