The Padre enlists Baltasar and Blimunda to work on his model of the Passarola, which he imagines to be the first airship. There, the young woman Blimunda joins him. He gains the financial support of the Padre Bartolomeu de Gusmão, working as his protégé. There, he hopes to find a program that will give him a pension for his service in the army. A fallen soldier without work or a clear path ahead, he goes to Lisbon. The novel opens as Baltasar sete-Sois is discharged from the Portuguese army, having just lost one of his hands in combat. The book was adapted into an opera, Blimunda in 1990. The novel is highly experimental in its use of diction and syntax, moving, often abruptly, between verbose description and stream-of-consciousness. While they undergo their own existential struggles, they encounter important figures in Portugal’s history, such as Padre Bartolomeu de Gusmão, a priest who invented a precursor to the airplane, and Domenico Scarlatti, a famous composer. A young man and woman, Baltasar and Blimunda, meet in Lisbon and fall in love in the midst of an international war. Set in the eighteenth century, it takes place during the construction of the famous Baroque and Neoclassical monastic palace, the Convent of Mafra, in Portugal-a place that is now one of the country’s most famous sites. Baltasar and Blimunda (first published in Portuguese as Memorial do Convento) is a 1982 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago.
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