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

José Saramango wrote his final book with great panache

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'

A novel of wit, warmth and wonder

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

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

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

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'

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

Saramago enjoys filling out the details with improvisatory skill and imagination

The Elephant's Journey is well worth picking up

A delicate meditation on mortality, decay and the fading of beauty

Historical fiction at its best

No novel is perfect, but this small, wonderfully atmospheric and immensely poignant story...comes very close

Blisteringly angry..,begins as a black comedy but gradually turns much darker with the mad-as-hell narrator suspected of murdering his lovers in London

Sutton shows us everything through Freeman's eyes and he pulls it off very well indeed. A horrible character but a compelling narrator

Sutton shows us everything through Freeman's eyes and he pulls it off very well indeed

This darkly comic novel with it's brilliantly acute observations of life in London in the 21st Century completely captures the zeitgeist and raises more than a few laughs.

Gripping and darkly comic tale of 21st-century material greed