SARAMAGO, Jose. [Harold Bloom].
Blindness.
New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998.
$7,500.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152653
+$500
First American Edition of Jose Saramago's Blindness; Inscribed by Him to Legendary Harold Bloom on the Day He Received the Nobel Prize
First American edition of the Nobel laureate’s harrowing masterpiece, an extraordinary association copy inscribed by José Saramago to literary critic Harold Bloom, the novelist’s most influential champion in the English-speaking world. Octavo, original boards. Association copy, inscribed by the author in Portuguese on the half-title, which translates as, “To Harold Bloom, with the admiration and respect of José Saramago,” and dated Stockholm, December 10, 1998, the very day on which Saramago received the Nobel Prize in Literature. No critic did more to establish Saramago’s reputation for American readers than Harold Bloom, who ranked him among the greatest novelists of the age and a permanent part of the Western canon. Laid in is a typed letter signed from Drenka Willen, Saramago’s editor at Harcourt Brace, to Bloom, dated 11 February 1998, sending him the forthcoming Blindness and appealing for his endorsement, noting that a comment from him would make all the difference in their efforts to promote the author. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. Fine in a fine dust jacket. An exceptional association copy uniting the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and the critic who did so much to bring him to the English-speaking world. Jacket design by Claudine Guerguerian.
Blindness, first published in Portugal as Ensaio sobre a Cegueira in 1995, is the most celebrated novel of José Saramago (1922-2010), who in 1998 became the first writer in the Portuguese language to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. A devastating allegory, it imagines a city struck by an epidemic of sudden white blindness and the collapse of civil order that follows, as the afflicted are herded into a quarantine that descends into squalor and violence, all witnessed by the one woman who inexplicably retains her sight. Written in Saramago’s distinctive manner of long, unpunctuated sentences and nameless characters, it stands among the great novels of the late twentieth century and was adapted into a 2008 film directed by Fernando Meirelles and starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo.
Blindness.
$7,500.00
In Stock