SOURCE: A review of Baltasar and Blimunda, in Quill and Quire, Vol. 53, No. 10, October, 1987, p. 30.

[In the following review, Stuewe offers a negative assessment of Baltasar and Blimunda, noting that Saramago fails to develop his characters beyond basic outlines.]

This colourful panorama of 18th-century Portugal [Baltasar and Blimunda] has almost everything going for it: vivid contrasts between the worlds of king and cutthroat, intensely real treatments of occult occurrences, and a definite flair for imaginative plotting. Unfortunately, the author has failed to devote the same amount of attention to his characters, who for the most part come across as arbitrary collections of uninteresting attributes. Thus it ultimately becomes very difficult to care about Baltasar or Blimunda or any of the rest of the novel's human elements, despite the attractive backgrounds against which they attempt to flicker into being. Unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez—whom the jacket copy unwisely invokes...