although the author scatters plenty of clues that he fully intends his periphrases and divagations. At some point he tells us that a story can be 10 words long or 100 or 100,000 -- that every story, in fact, is infinitely extensible. He jokingly refers to his own long-windedness -- which differs from real pomposity in that it is never dull or humorless." Attitude to the Reconquista As noted by the Israeli reviewer Noam Levinhof a major theme in the book is Saramago's appreciation of the Reconquista, a central element in the history of Portugal as well as Spain, of which the conquest or re-conquest of Lisbon by Christians and its transformation into the capital of Portugal is a key event. The protagonist Silva, who can be assumed to at least partially represent Saramago himself in the matter, is very ambiguous in his attitude. On the one hand, he is Portuguese in nationality and - though not very religiousis part of many centuries of Portuguese Christian culture. He is well aware that but for the conquest of Lisbon, Portugal as we know it would never have come into being, and in one passage he states he would not have liked to find himself living "in a city of Moors". On the other hand, as being a Lisbonian born and bred – and specifically, an inhabitant of Lisbon's Old City, which had been the Moorish city and stood the Christian siege – he is very much in sympathy with the Moorish people of Lisbon, who were attacked by what was for them an alien and cruel conquering army, who starved under the siege and were reduced to eating dogs (a point which is repeatedly referred to in the book) and were subjected to a massacre when the city finally fell. One way of partially reconciling these two opposing attitudes is having the quite sympathetic Portuguese Christian warrior who takes a prominent part in the book bearing an Arabic name – implying that he was himself of Mozarab or Muslim ancestry, and in general that despite the bloody fighting between Christians and Muslims, there was a certain basic continuity of the people inhabiting the Portuguese territory, whatever their religion. Levinhof compared Saramago's ambiguous attitude to the conquest of Muslim Lisbon and its transformation into a Christian city to the attitude of many Israelis to the conquest of Arab cities during the Israeli