Trip to Portugal

Between October 1979 and July 1980, José Saramago travelled the length and breadth of the country at the invitation of Círculo de Leitores, which was celebrating the tenth anniversary of its establishment in Portugal. The author said after this wandering, a mixture of chronicle, narrative and recollections, that "the end of one journey is only the beginning of another. You have to see what hasn't been seen, see again what you've already seen, see in spring what you saw in summer, see by day what you saw by night... You have to retrace the steps that were taken, to repeat them, and to trace new paths."