The Elephant's Journey

It is extremely funny. Old Saramago writes with a masterfully light hand, and the humour is tender, a mockery so tempered by patience and pity that the sting is gone though the wit remains vital... a series of contained miracles of absurdity, quiet laughter rising out of a profound, resigned, affectionate wisdom

Ursula K Le Guin, Guardian

The novel has a charming fairy tale quality, with its kings and courtiers, it pachyderm protagonist and his mysterious mahout: this is amoung the most charming of Saramago's works

Michael Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement

The Elephant's Journey is well worth picking up

Syndicated review to local papers

José Saramango wrote his final book with great panache

Margaret Reynolds, The Times

It's an epic ramble that the Nobel Prize-winning author saw as a metaphor for life

Timeout

Here he has seized the opportunity to turn an unlikely tale of a transalpine hike into something far larger even than its elephantine subject.

Amanda Hopkinson, Independent

Saramago enjoys filling out the details with improvisatory skill and imagination

John Spurling, Sunday Times

A playful, intellectual, very European novel, at times if feels reminiscent of Kafka in his lighter moments

Independent on Sunday

Here is a book as serious as it is charming; amid its ironies runs a sustained pleas for the subversive workings of the imagination: "every elephant contains two elephants, one who learns what he's being taught and another who insists on ignoring it all". Thank goodness for that'

Guardian

In laconic prose, Saramago skilfully builds a journey of delicious digressions that set up resonances from Miguel de Cervantes' picaresque chivalries to Czech humorist Jaroslav Hasek's pigeon - fancying soldier Schweik - all delivered with a jocular pedantry that satirises pomp and grand designs'

Financial Times

A novel of wit, warmth and wonder

Yann Martel