Such was the pleasure we derived from seeing Madrid by bike and such was the shortness of memory over the saddle discomfort we suffered that we decided to do it again in Lisbon.

Having planned the whole trip in secret, J booked a couple of excursions with Lisbon Bike Tour, an adventure company run by the delectable Filipe Palma.

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Lisbon bike and kayak

Lisbon is great to visit by bike - provided you start at the top of a hill. And when you're done with the city, the beautiful coastline awaits!

Arrábida

The first day was split between a mountain bike ride along the tracks and (quieter) roads of the Parque Natural da Arrábida.

The parcours ran from the vineyard village of Vila Fresca de Azeitão to the slender beach at Portinho da Arrábida, where we enjoyed a fresh fish lunch.

During the afternoon, we headed out from the beach in our kayaks as far as a sand spit off the coast of Outão. The return journey was much easier thanks to a favourable wind!

Larger map of this route

Lisbon

On the second day we picked up the bikes again, this time at the Miradouro do Parque Eduardo VII, whence Filipe took us on a tour of Lisbon.

The ride was not particularly difficult, with the first half being downhill all the way from the Parque Eduardo VII to Praça do Comércio, with intermittent stops for historical background. Even so, negotiating paths shared with pedestrians and traffic crossings did require a certain amount of caution and coolheadedness.

We stopped briefly for a little glass of ginjinha and some classic pastéis de nata at Martinho da Arcada, a café frequented by intellectuals, artists and writers. Both Fernando Pessoa and more recently José Saramago had reserved seats there.

After refreshments, we headed out along the riverside through Cais do Sodré and the dockyards, under the Ponte 25 de Abril to Belém. The tour ended splendidly at the Torre de Belém, from which point we picked up our own itinerary by heading to the Museu Berardo, the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos and of course the “official” Pastéis de Belém shop for another (well-earned) dose of pastéis.

Larger map of this route

Boa viagem!

• José Saramago
• Harvill Press (2001 edition)
• 

This was José Saramago’s breakthrough novel in the English language. His narrating personality is less obvious here but, even as he describes the events of three centuries ago, he still can’t resist the occasional modern reference.

There’s also an interesting, slightly bitter tone. This is a story that crosses the spectrum of 18th century Portugal, opening with the royal family and descending from palace to the street where we find our protagonists Baltasar and Blimunda. That initial sweep sets the pattern of the novel, with Father Bartolomeo Lourenço passing between both camps.

The priest has designed a flying machine that, in taking off, threatens to leave his faith behind as well as the ground. The two young lovers assisting him are also Saramago’s vehicle for showing us the hardships and poverty of ordinary lives. Thus the author wastes no opportunity to contrast the lot of such folk with that of the self-absorbed, near frivolous royals. Only in the queen and princess do we detect a note of sadness, for the freedom of their lives is severely limited by protocol, arranged marriage and the ugly male expectation of childbirth.

I felt that something lacked in Baltasar and Blimunda. We eagerly await the flight of Father Lourenço’s contraption for half the novel, the anticipation of which drives the story. However, while in the other half we’re supposed to all but forget about the magnificent machine while we witness instead a town’s struggle to build a ridiculous, excessive royal convent. Even so, Saramago’s capacity for critical observation is almost compensation enough.

• José Saramago
• Harvill (first published 1999)
• 

You can imagine the sort of outraged comments this book will have provoked from many zealous Christians. If online bookseller Amazon certainly intended customer reviews to help sell books, there’s a danger here of their pages turning into a forum for religious debate. “The Bible storyline is flagrantly ignored, replaced, changed, and enlarged,” spits one reviewer at the American website, “with Jesus, instead of being the ‘perfect sacrifice’, being a pretty good guy who falls into sin just as easily as your or I”. The same reviewer later adds, “If the gospel is true, and I believe it is 100% true, we had all better be deadly serious about what it says.”

Those who have read more of Saramago will know that ‘deadly serious’ is a state into which the author never allows himself to transgress. It must be said, however, that he is frequently less playful in The Gospel According To Jesus Christ than in others of his works, signalling that he may well be mindful of the paths he treads here.

Indeed Saramago shows himself to have a detailed knowledge of the synoptic gospels, the geopolitics of the period and even an appreciation of the social mores. Whilst his rendering of the biblical world offers up cruelty, hardships and instability, this never obscures its immediacy for the reader.

Before I set out into the author’s desert, in the midst of which he reminds us we may all speak freely, I expected to encounter blasphemies through the course of some sort of alternative narrative of Jesus Christ’s life. In this way, the novel’s path would bear comparison with those already fashioned by Norman Mailer or Nikos Kazantzakis.

What surprised me instead was how Saramago actually more or less stuck to the original plot of the gospels. There are a few fascinating deviations, most of which serve to emphasise Jesus’ humanity, but in general the preference is for biblical course of events.

Saramago presents his most studied profanations in Jesus’ dealings with God and the Devil. In the novel’s climax, all three can be found together in a sort of holy council. For the author, God is an implacable, almost arrogant God who acknowledges and downplays the existence of other deities, treats humanity with harsh indifference and seeks only His Own Greatness. The devil, conversely, comes across as a reasonable sort of figure who recognises the implicit necessity of his own existence in order to maintain the status of the Other.

Ultimately, however, the success of the novel is to be found in the marvellous illustration of human relationships, moulded by the conditions and circumstances of the times. Even if Saramago tends to zigzag rather wildly between “authorised” history and dramatic invention when the story accelerates in the third act, you have to admire his steady handling of family and guilt issues earlier on.

• José Saramago
• Harvill Secker (2008)
• 
• Author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998

As translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Saramago is the sort of wise old gent we’d want present if we could still demand bedtime stories in adulthood. Death at Intervals has all of the charm, quietly controlled meanderings and simple sagacity of a writer who’s plainly enjoying his literary prime.

Based on a “what-if”, the sort of open question of which screenwriters are fond, this is another of Saramago’s metaphysical fables in which Death decides to take a break, such that the order of human society starts to collapse. And Death is female, a fact of which Saramago convinces us in his typically laborious, yet always affable, style.

Just as in The Double, the writer delights once more in telling the tale of an illogical cause and its logical effects. For, in Saramago’s world, a doppelgänger will fancy your wife, the Devil is quite pleasant and a whole population will spontaneously choose not to vote.