The Cave - Hardcover

José Saramago is a master at pacing. Readers unfamiliar with the work of this Portuguese Nobel Prize winner would do well to begin with The Cave, a novel of ideas, shaded with suspense. Spare and pensive, The Cave follows the fortunes of an aging potter, Cipriano Algor, beginning with his weekly delivery of plates to the Center, a high-walled, windowless shopping complex, residential community, and nerve center that dominates the region. What sells at the Center will sell everywhere else, and what the Center rejects can barely be given away in the surrounding towns and villages. The news for Cipriano that morning isn't good. Half of his regular pottery shipment is rejected, and he is told that the consumers now prefer plastic tableware. Over the next week, he and his grown daughter Marta grieve for their lost craft, but they gradually open their eyes to the strange bounty of their new condition: a stray dog adopts them, and a lovely widow enters Cipriano's life. When they are invited to live at the Center, it seems ungracious to refuse, but there are strange developments under the complex and a troubling increase in security, and Cipriano changes all their fates by deciding to investigate. In Saramago's able hands, what might have become a dry social allegory is a delicately elaborated story of individualism and unexpected love. --Regina Marler

A Los Angeles Times Best Book
A New York Times Notable Book

"[The Cave] is yet another triumph . . . for Portugal's, or even the world's, greatest living novelist. Read it."-The Washington Post Book World
Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his daughter Marta and her husband Marçal in a small village on the outskirts of The Center, an imposing complex of shops and apartments to which Cipriano delivers his wares. One day, he is told not to make any more deliveries. Unwilling to give up his craft, Cipriano tries his hand at making ceramic dolls. Astonishingly, The Center places an order for hundreds. But just as suddenly, the order is cancelled and the penniless three have to move from the village into The Center. When mysterious sounds of digging emerge from beneath their new apartment, Cipriano
and Marçal investigate; what they find transforms the family's life. Filled with the depth, humor, and extraordinary philosophical richness that marks each of Saramago's novels, The Cave is one of the essential books of our time.
"As with Proust, to be drawn into a Saramago sentence is to be drawn into a world that takes shape out of a maze. . . . His human voices wake us and we live."-The New York Times Book Review

JOSÉ SARAMAGO is one of the most acclaimed writers in the world today. He is the author of numerous novels, including All the Names and Blindness. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. -Chicago Tribune

MARGARET JULL COSTA has established herself as the premier translator of Portuguese literature into English today, and her previous renderings of Saramago's novels are highly acclaimed.