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Travel Literature
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The Portuguese: The Land and Its People (2006), by Marion Kaplan, is an excellent one-volume introduction to the country, covering history, culture and other facets of Portuguese identity.
Lisbon: A Cultural and Literary Companion (2002), by Paul Buck, takes readers on a journey through some of Lisbon’s well-known neighbourhoods, sharing curious anecdotes spanning the past 500 years or so.
Journey to Portugal: A Pursuit of Portugal’s History and Culture (1981) is José Saramago’s account of his travels in 1979. Unfortunately, the richly imaginative style found in the Nobel Prize winner’s novels is surprisingly absent in these rather dull travel essays.
Stepping back in time, Fernando Pessoa’s Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See (1925) portrays the many faces of the poet’s hometown, though it too can be a bit of a plod. A more successful work by a great writer is Almeida Garrett’s Travels in my Homeland (1846), which is full of wry observations about Portugal but also touches on philosophy, poetry, nature and other Romantic-era topics.
Representing one of the country’s many expat admirers is the work by 19th-century Gothic novelist William Beckford. He wrote a rollicking tale of his stay in Sintra and travels around Estremadura in Journals and Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha (1835).
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