He is without sentimentality. In his understanding of people Saramago brings us something very rare: a disillusion that allows affection and admiration, a clear-sighted forgiveness. He doesn’t expect too much of us. He is perhaps closer in spirit and in humor to our first great novelist, Cervantes, than any novelist since. When the dream of reason and the hope of justice are endlessly disappointed, cynicism is the easy out; but Saramago the stubborn peasant will not take the easy out.
Of course he was no peasant. He worked his way up from ancestral poverty, through working as a garage mechanic, to become an educated, cultivated intellectual and man of letters, an editor and journalist. For years a city dweller, he loved Lisbon, and he deals as an insider with the issues of urban/industrial life. Yet often in his novels he also looks on that life from a place outside the city, a place where people make their own living with their own hands. He offers no idyllic pastoral regression, but a realistic sense of where and how common people genuinely connect with what is left of our common world.
The most visibly radical thing about his novels is the punctuation. Readers may be put off by his use of commas instead of periods and his refusal to paragraph, which makes the page a forbidding block of print, and the dialogue frequently a puzzle as to who is speaking. This is a radical regression, on the way back to the medieval manuscript with no spaces between the words. I don’t know his reason for these idiosyncrasies. I learned to accept them, but still dislike them; his use of what teachers call “comma fault” or “run-on sentences” makes me read too fast, breathlessly, losing the shape of the sentence and the speech-and-pause rhythm of conversation.
Grant him that quirk, and his prose, in the hands of his splendid translators, is clear, cogent, lively, robust, perfectly suited to narrative. He wastes no words. He is a great storyteller. (Try reading him aloud.) And the stories he has to tell are not like any others.
Here are some brief notes about them, reflections on my own process of learning how to read Saramago, an education by no means completed.
His first published novel, Risen from the Ground, is not available at this time in English. It is, I gather, about the peasants of the Alentejo, and he refers to it as the book “where the way of narrating my novels was born,” which makes me long to see it.
Baltasar and Blimunda, published in Portugal in 1982, earned prompt acclaim in Europe. A historical fantasy, full of such unexpected and unpredictable elements as Domenico Scarlatti, the Inquisition, a witch, and an airplane, it is odd, charming, funny, teasing. To me it seems a lovable warm-up for the greater novels to come, but it made his reputation, and many hold it to be among his best.
Of all his books, I have the most difficulty with The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. This is Saramago at his most intellectually Borgesian. Also perhaps at his most Portuguese. It asks of the reader, if not some knowledge of its subjects (the writer Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese literary culture, the city of Lisbon), at least a fascination with masks, doubles, assumed identities, which Saramago certainly had and I almost entirely lack. A reader who shares that fascination with him will find this (and later The Double) a treasure.
Of his next book, in his autobiography for the Nobel Prize he says simply, “In consequence of the Portuguese government censorship of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), vetoing its presentation for the European Literary Prize under the pretext that the book was offensive to Catholics, my wife and I transferred our residence to the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries.” Most men who leave their homeland in protest against tyrannical bigotry go off shouting, pointing their fingers, shaking their fists. He just “transferred his residence.” I confess that the subject of the book is, again, not of the highest interest to me, but it is a subtle, kind, and quietly unsettling work, an outstanding addition to the long list of Jesus novels (which may begin, as the title of this one implies, with the Gospels themselves).
The Stone Raft is a lovely novel, which had the very rare fortune of being turned into a lovely movie, made in Spain. Europe comes apart at the Pyrenees, so that the Iberian Peninsula begins drifting slowly off toward the Canary Islands, toward America… Saramago takes full advantage of this opportunity to make fun of the impatient and impotent pomposity of governments and the media when faced with events beyond the scope of bureaucrats and pundits, and also to explore the responses of some obscure citizens, “ordinary people,” as we call them, to the same mysterious events. This is one of his funniest books. And here also we find the first important Saramago dog. I tend to rank his novels with a dog in them higher than the ones without. I’m not sure why; it may have something to do with his refusal to consider man as central in the scheme of things. The more people fixate on humanity, it sometimes seems, the less humane they are.
Next—he was in his seventies now, and writing a novel every year or two—comes The History of the Siege of Lisbon. The first time I read it, I liked it, but felt stupid and inadequate because it is or appears to be about the founding event of Portuguese history, and I know no Portuguese history. I was reading too carelessly to realize that my ignorance made no difference at all. Rereading it, I found that of course everything you need to know is in the noveclass="underline" the “real” history of what happened in the twelfth century when the Christians besieged the Moors in Lisbon, and the “virtual” history that comes to be interwoven with it, through the change of a single word, a deliberate mistake introduced into a new History of the Siege of Lisbon by a proofreader in Lisbon in the twentieth century. And the hero of the story (and the love story) is the proofreader. That alone was enough to win my heart.
Immediately after this mellow and meditative tale comes Blindness (its Portuguese title is An Essay on Blindness), which won its author the Nobel Prize. It is the most deeply frightening novel I have ever read.
It was the first of Saramago’s that I tried to read—my friend the poet Naomi Replansky said I had to. I tried and failed. The punctuation annoyed me, but the story itself appalled me.
To be willing to read about terrible cruelty, I need to trust the author. Trust unquestioningly, the way one trusts Primo Levi. Too many writers use violence and cruelty to sell their books, to “thrill” readers who have been trained to think nothing is interesting but “action,” or to keep their own demons at bay by loosing them on other people. I don’t read those books. I will let a writer torture me only if I accept his reasons for doing so. I had to find out Saramago’s reasons. So at that point I got hold of all his books then in print in English and read them. Too hastily, too carelessly, as I have said, but I was ignorant—I was learning how to read Saramago. To read him is, in fact, an education, a relearning how to see the world, a new way of understanding…as it is with all the great novelists, from Cervantes through Austen to Tolstoy, Woolf, García Márquez…
Having learned that I could trust this author absolutely, I went back and read Blindness. To me it is an almost unbearably moving novel and the truest parable of the twentieth century. (I have not seen the film based on it; I did not trust the filmmakers.) It completely changed my idea of what literature, at this strange time of paralysis in crisis, can be and do.
Soon after Blindness came the story “The Tale of the Unknown Island,” an endearing and witty fable, and soon after that, All the Names, perhaps the most Kafkaesque of his novels, with its satire of a monstrous bureaucracy. Comparing Saramago with Kafka is a tricky business, though; I can’t imagine Saramago writing “Metamorphosis” any more than I can imagine Kafka writing a love story. And All the Names, with its unforgettable Registry that leads back into impenetrable darkness, its protagonist the clerk Senhor José, driven to seek the person behind one of the innumerable names in the files of the Registry, if not exactly a love story, is a story about love.