The History of the Siege of Lisbon · History
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
also known as História do Cerco de Lisboa
Raimundo Silva
Two books of the same title: a standard history of 1147, sabotaged by a single negation, and the novel a proofreader then has to write, in which the crusaders do not help take Lisbon and a love story has room to happen.
Dick invented a novel in which the Axis won. Saramago invents a history in which a word won.
The crusaders either helped to take Lisbon in 1147 or they did not. They did. Silva writes “not.” From that syllable he owes a city: a siege without the northern ships, a king who must do the work himself, a love affair in the twelfth century to match the one in the proofroom. The published Saramago is both the office and the siege. You are never only in one.
This is the opposite of Casaubon’s Key. Casaubon wanted one original from which all stories descended. Silva wants a single alteration from which a second past can be grown. Menard wanted the same words with a different author. Silva wants a different word with the same city. All three are librarians’ heresies. Only Silva is a clerk, which is why the heresy is so small you could miss it on a galleys page, and why it isn’t small.
Saramago had already put Herbert Quain in Ricardo Reis’s hands. He knew what kind of library he was walking into.
On the readability rating. The alternative siege is written out, at length, inside the novel. The sabotaged history exists as a corrected edition with an errata slip. Neither is a book you can order under Silva’s name. Both are the book you are holding.
In-world history
Raimundo Silva, a Lisbon proofreader, is correcting a historian's account of Afonso Henriques and the siege. He adds "not": the crusaders will not help. The house finds it; he is not sacked. Maria Sara, who oversees the proofreaders, tells him to write the book his emendation implies. He does. The 1147 that follows is starved, stubborn, and invented, and it runs in parallel with a courtship in the present. Pessoa is mentioned once and present everywhere: a clerk, a cigarette not smoked, the uncertainty of everything.
Why it matters
Saramago's proofreader commits, in one word, the heresy this catalogue exists to take seriously: that a book of the past is a sentence someone could have written otherwise. The "not" is the smallest possible imagined volume, and it generates a city.
Appearances
- The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989) — José Saramago A proofreader inserts the word "not" into a history, then writes the history that the "not" requires
Connected volumes
- Related to The Grasshopper Lies Heavy · The Man in the High Castle
- Related to Pierre Menard's Quixote · The Fictions of Borges
- Related to The God of the Labyrinth · The Fictions of Borges
Catalogue record
- Category
- History
- World
- The History of the Siege of Lisbon
- Imagined by
- José Saramago
- Language
- Portuguese
- First appearance
- História do Cerco de Lisboa (Caminho, 1989)
- Readability
- Extensive excerpts
Sources
- José Saramago, História do Cerco de Lisboa (Caminho, 1989). English translation by Giovanni Pontiero (Harvill / Harcourt Brace, 1996).
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06