Dimensions
135 x 215 x 20mm
One day a rift opens along the border between Spain and France, and the Iberian peninsula floats off resolutely westward across the Atlantic, a great stone raft. The impact on the geopolitical scene is fundamental, as the North American powers look to acquire a whole new tract of land and the population lost to Europe. (Only a staunch Gibralatar gets left behind on its rock.).
But what of the floating population? Spaniards and Portuguese, disrupted in their daily routines, quit their homes, escaping the looming perils of the coast and go restlessly wandering the inland roads; they are only the more disorientated when the raft starts to revolve on its own axis, so that the sun rises in what used to be the west.
Among the new vagrants are three men, two women and a dog, who meet by chance - or destiny - and take to the road in an elderly 2CV until they are obliged to settle for a wagon drawn by two ill-assorted horses. The humans pair off into couples, though even the odd-man-out will have his moment of domesticity. And as they pursue their tinkers' existence they discover in themselves unsuspected riddles, and the answers to them.
Told in a deceptively simple, naive style, this tale of fixed points and shifting goals is a superb vehicle for Jose Saramago's shrewd and witty dissection of contemporary Europe.
