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    The Tale of the Unknown Island
    The Tale of the Unknown Island
    The Tale of the Unknown Island
    Ebook45 pages29 minutes

    The Tale of the Unknown Island

    By José Saramago

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    A dreamer petitions his king for a boat—and gets more than he bargained for—in “this richly enigmatic short story” by the Nobel Prize-winning author (Kirkus).

    “A man went to knock at the king's door and said, Give me a boat. The king's house had many other doors, but this was the door for petitions. But the king spent all his time sitting at the door for favors (favors being offered to the king, you understand), whenever he heard someone knocking at the door for petitions, he would pretend not to hear . . ."

    So begins this beautifully illustrated and deceptively simple fable. Why the petitioner required a boat, where he was bound for, and who volunteered to crew for him, the reader will soon discover. In a departure from his linguistically dense and sprawling historical novels, Jose Saramago presents a philosophic love story worthy of Swift or Voltaire.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 5, 2000
    ISBN9780547545547
    The Tale of the Unknown Island
    Author

    José Saramago

    JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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      Book preview

      The Tale of the Unknown Island - José Saramago

      [Image]

      Contents

      Title Page

      Contents

      Frontispiece

      Copyright

      The Tale of the Unknown Island

      About the Authors

      [Image]

      © 1998, José Saramago

      English translation copyright © 1999 by Margaret Jull Costa

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

      www.hmhco.com

      This is a translation of O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida.

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

      Saramago, José.

      [Conto da ilha desconhecida. English]

      The tale of the unknown island/José Saramago: illustrated by Peter Sís: translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.

      p. cm.

      ISBN 0-15-100595-8

      I. Costa, Margaret Jull. II. Title.

      PQ928I.A66C6613 1999

      869.3'42—dc21 99-31111

      eISBN 978-0-547-54554-7

      v5.0516

      A MAN WENT TO KNOCK AT THE KING’S DOOR, AND SAID Give me a boat. The king’s house had many other doors, but this was the door for petitions. Since the king spent all his time sitting at the door for favors (favors being offered to the king, you understand), whenever he heard someone knocking at the door for petitions, he would pretend not to hear, and only when the continuous pounding of the bronze doorknocker became not just deafening, but positively scandalous, disturbing the peace of the neighborhood (people would start muttering, What kind of king is he if he won’t even answer the door), only then would he order the first secretary to go and find out what the supplicant wanted, since there seemed no way of silencing him. Then, the first secretary would call the

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