"H. begins to emerge from his stagnancy when he discovers that writing—about his travels in Italy, at first—unlocks creative energies that painting cannot. With this realization comes the promise of real romance but also, in the desperate last days of the Salazar autocracy, certain responsibilities. All fiction is biography, Saramago reminds us, and it is indeed tempting to understand H.'s awakening as a depiction of Saramago's own. But this is Saramago, after all, so even a portrait of the artist as a young man hints at the profound and the universal."—Booklist