Thinking about taking up a José Saramago reading/review project for the coming years

I have several José Saramago works (poetry, prose, drama, essays) in Portuguese and Spanish translations that I have never reviewed.  I'm contemplating trying to locate, read, and possibly review in the future those major works of his (and some minor ones) that I haven't yet written about here.  This is going to be a links post where I can update the books read (possibly by language) as well as links to the reviews whenever I do write them.  This likely will be a years-long project, so don't expect me to rush out to go buy two dozen books now.  Anyways, the list (bold for works read):



Poetry

 Os poemas possiveis (in Spanish)

 Provavelmente alegria

 O ano de 1993

 Prose

Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia: romance

 Objecto quase

 Levantado do Chão: romance

Memorial do Convento: romance

 O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis: romance (also in Spanish)

 A jangada de pedra: romance (in Spanish)

 História do cerco de Lisboa: romance

 O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo: romance (also in Spanish)

 Ensaio sobre a cegueira: romance (in Spanish)

Todos os nomes: romance (also in Spanish)

 Terra do Pecado : romance

O conto da Ilha Desconhecida / desenhos (in Spanish)

A caverna : romance. (in Spanish)

O homem duplicado : romance (also in Spanish)

 Ensaio sobre a Lucidez : romance (in Spanish)

As intermitências da morte : romance (in Spanish)

 As pequenas memórias (in Spanish)

 A Viagem do Elefante (in Spanish)

Caim : romance (in Spanish)

 Nas suas palavras / edição e selecção de Fernando Gómez Aguilera

 O silêncio da água

 Claraboia : romance


 Essays

Deste mundo e do outro

 A bagagem do viajante: crónicas

As opiniões que o DL teve

Os apontamentos: crónicas políticas

 Viagem a Portugal

 Folhas políticas : 1976-1998

 Discursos de Estocolmo


 Drama

A noite

 Que farei com este livro?

 A segunda vida de Francisco de Assis

 In nomine Dei

 Don Giovanni ou O dissoluto absolvido : teatro

 Diaries Cadernos de Lanzarote : diário. Vol. 1-5. (own part of it in Portuguese)

R.I.P. José Saramago

I woke up this morning to the news that Portuguese writer José Saramago had died, at the age of 87.  Throughout the day, whether it be links on forums that I read, Twitter tweets in Portuguese and English about it, or even a news brief in Spanish on Univision during halftime of the England-Algeria match, so much talk has been made about the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.  Doubtless there are several finer eulogies that have been composed or are being composed right now, but I feel compelled to give a sort of anti-eulogy here, as I suspect Saramago would not have it any other way.

In looking back on a recently-deceased author's oeuvre, it is commonplace for the eulogist to highlight the deceased's best qualities and to downplay those traits that make us uncomfortable.  Doubtless, there are several praising Saramago in vague terms, lauding him for his commitment to social justice and declaiming the virtues of his prose.  What I fear might be lost in this praise is the fact that so often, Saramago's stories and commentaries divided his readership, causing no end of controversies about the subject matters he covered and the treatment that those subjects received in his prose. 

For myself, when I discovered Saramago in 2003, it was a revelatory experience, but it was also a series of challenges to values and traditions that I had held dear.  I remember reading the English translation of a recent book, The Cave (as I had not yet becoming reading proficient in Spanish - or Portuguese, as I am now, more or less) and finding myself lost in his long winding passages, where narrative and dialogue intertwined, creating a sort of mental haze by which Saramago's thoughts on industrialization and the Platonic search for identity penetrated my thoughts closely.  I loved what I read and yet I resisted much of what was being said.  A good story does not need for the Reader to agree with the Author.  If anything, if the Reader and the Author, via the Text, can be in opposition and yet a dialogue could be established, then that story may be of more value to the Reader for the effort expended in wrestling with the Text, trying to sort out the complex emotions generated from that interaction.

Saramago in virtually all of his novels, short fictions, and non-fiction writings has managed to make me struggle to understand his viewpoints, to see the world through the eyes of his protagonists, and to turn that vision inward, to see if what I had considered to be "truth" could in fact be self-deception.  But there were times in which I could not agree with what he was arguing.  In one of his three most famous works, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, I just could not accept what he was doing.  I understood why he had to write that tale and part of me admired him for tackling such a controversial topic with aplomb, but I just could not wrap my mind around some of his arguments; they were too strident, too full of condemnation for the faith that I've held true for most of my life.  But yet even in this rejection of the themes behind some of his fiction, I found great value.  There was a genuine love for people, even despite the pessimistic view he often expressed about how people would manage in a modern society whose values served to dehumanize its denizens.  Even when his anger and frustration were most evident, as in his final novel, Cain, it was obvious that he had not abandoned his fellow human beings.  But he was so bitter then, as if he knew he had little time remaining to attempt to influence others.  It affected that novel, making it perhaps his weakest in twenty years.

But even in this, Saramago still exerted a strong influence on his readers.  Those who immersed themselves in his prose, who delved further into the Text, those were rewarded with vivid images and striking social contrasts to consider.  José Saramago was a social and literary gadfly of the highest order and I cannot help but feel it would be a grave disrespect to his memory and to the person he was if I did not note this element in his literary output and in the person himself.  Gadflies are not universally loved, but the best of them are highly respected and after their last buzzing has been quelled and the last clod of earth thrown over his grave, it would behoove the reader to remember that such people as Saramago are valued not just for their successes, but also for their noble failures.  Even if we may not agree with them very often, the world needs more people like José Saramago in this world to remind us of how powerful of a dream social justice on this planet can be.  He will be dearly missed.

José Saramago, Caín

Portuguese author José Saramago is no stranger to controversy.  In 1992, he left his native Portugal for the Spanish province of the Canary Islands as a symbolic protest of the Portuguese government blocking the nomination of his The Gospel According to Jesus Christ for a major European literary award, due mostly to the rather unflattering comments Saramago made about the founder of the Christian faith.  So it was with great curiosity that I recently placed an order for his latest book, Caín, bolstered by comments reported in an online UK publication:

A Catholic Church official in Portugal says that comments by Nobel literature laureate Jose Saramago about the Bible are ''offensive.''

A row broke out in Portugal on Monday after a Nobel Prize-winning author denounced the Bible as a "handbook of bad morals".

Speaking at the launch of his new book "Cain", Jose Saramago, who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, said society would probably be better off without the Bible.

Saramago's new work of fiction, ''Cain,'' takes a critical and sometimes lighthearted look at the life of Adam and Eve's son. Saramago said at the book's launch late Sunday that the Bible is ''a catalog of cruelty and of what's worst in human nature.''

So how "offensive" was Caín?  It depends in large part upon one's perspectives on the Bible, in this case the Old Testament.  Familiarity with his earlier book, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, certainly helps, as there are certain parallels drawn between motives and causalities in the two novels.  But unlike his earlier book, Caín is a much more flawed novel.

The story begins in the beginning.  In his typical non-traditional prose style, Saramago sets the tone for the fractious relationship between humans and God (the translation is mine and all errors are mine):

When the Lord, also known as God, realized that Adam and Eve, perfect in all that could be shown by sight, did not utter a word  nor did they emit a simple sound, primary [creatures] that they were, he had no other recourse than to be irritated with himself, since there was nobody else in the Garden of Eden who was responsible for the serious fault... In a fit of anger, surprising in one who would be able to solve it with another rapid fiat, he ran to where the pair were and, one then the other, without contemplation, without beating around the bush, he placed language inside them. (p. 11)

God is shown here as being willful and capricious at best, self-centered and prone to anger at the worst.  In placing his beginning at this beginning, it is clear that Saramago is taking a much more panoramic view of the Biblical stories of creation and destruction.  This is especially evident when the story shifts to that of Cain and Abel themselves.

Saramago does not spend much time on this account.  He notes how each brother lifts up his labor's produce, grains for Cain and lamb for Abel, to God in offering.  Abel's votive smoke rises straight up, a sign of divine approval, while Cain's is scattered almost immediately.  But instead of focusing on Cain's jealous anger, Saramago shifts the blame to the capricious God, who chides Cain without ever explaining himself.  In this telling of the first murder story, Saramago has Cain kill Abel as an act of defiance toward God, setting himself off as the accuser of God, a role that in Hebreo-Christian cosmology usually belongs to Satan.  After this point, Cain becomes less of an actual character, but more of an accusatory, Greek chorus-like figure who remains mostly in the background for the latter stories.

Several figures from either the Bible or Jewish legends enter in rapid succession.  Lilith, the mythical first wife of Adam appears.  Although Saramago attempts to have her eroticism, a tribute to previous legends regarding her as the mother of demons, serve as another counterpoint to the rigid, overbearing regulations of God, he fails to develop adequately her character, leaving her, like Cain, as little more than a symbolic cipher.  The same happens with other Biblical characters from Abraham to Lot to Joshua to Job to Noah, in a strange placement of characters in a seeming passage of a few short years rather than the thousands recorded in the Genesis accounts.  Saramago starts with a brief character sketch, often unflattering to the character (Abraham being portrayed as being duplicitous while Lot's drunken incest with his daughters gets some speculative discourse), before positing just how unfair and tyrannical God is.

The highlight of this scathing denunciation is that of Cain and Abraham's visit to Sodom.  The tale of the fifty innocents has been turned around, noting that the infants and toddlers of that condemned city could not in any way be responsible for the sins of their fathers, but yet God's will always seems to punish the succeeding generations for the faults of their forebears.  It is a powerful scene and one of the few where Cain's presence serves to underscore the incomprehensibility of what is transpiring.

But unfortunately, for the most part Caín is a relatively weak story.  Unlike the earlier The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Cain in this story rarely has more than an inveterate hatred of God to reveal to the reader; there is little depth to his character.  By placing Cain in the Satan/Wandering Jew roles, Saramago creates a narrative remoteness that makes it difficult to grasp at times what is just so sickening about how the Old Testament portrays God.  Saramago is full of righteous indignation at what he sees is at the heart of the Bible, but unfortunately for him, his narrative mode fails to deliver the full force of what he views as being one of the foremost outrages in human history.

Caín therefore is a deeply failed novel.  It contains some moments of profundity similar to what appears in several of Saramago's writings, but it ultimately fails to connect with its readers the way that his other novels have done.  This novel reads more as a screed and less as a probing look into the internal inconsistencies of the Bible.  The choice of one of the more unsympathetic characters from the Genesis legends certainly did not help matters, as Cain's murder is blithely passed off, as Saramago has bigger, more divine, fish to fry.  Caín ultimately is little more than a sketch of a condemnatory tale, one that Saramago told to much greater effect in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Recommended only for those who have already read Saramago's more famous works and are completists at heart.

Saramago on writing and "translating"

It is a shame that Nobel laureate José Saramago's blog, El Cuaderno de Saramago, is only available in Portuguese and Spanish, as he updates his blog almost daily, often with some interesting musings, such as the one below on writing being a form of translation. I had a formal translation almost done, but I left it at work, so for now I'm going to post the entry and give a brief synopsis of it without being too literal to his text. Later, I'll edit this post with a more exact translation (the irony is something else, no?):

Escribir es traducir. Siempre lo será. Incluso cuando estamos utilizando nuestra propia lengua. Transportamos lo que vemos y lo que sentimos (suponiendo que el ver y el sentir, como en general los entendemos, sean algo más que las palabras con las que nos va siendo relativamente posible expresar lo visto y lo sentido…) a un código convencional de signos, la escritura, y dejamos a las circunstancias y a las casualidades de la comunicación la responsabilidad de hacer llegar hasta la inteligencia del lector, no la integridad de la experiencia que nos propusimos transmitir (inevitablemente parcelada en cuanto a la realidad de que se había alimentado), sino al menos una sombra de lo que en el fondo de nuestro espíritu sabemos que es intraducible, por ejemplo, la emoción pura de un encuentro, el deslumbramiento de una descubierta, ese instante fugaz de silencio anterior a la palabra que se quedará en la memoria como el resto de un sueño que el tiempo no borrará por completo.

El trabajo de quien traduce consistirá, por tanto, en pasar a otro idioma (en principio, al propio) lo que en la obra y en el idioma original y había sido ya “traducción”, es decir, una determinada percepción de una realidad social, histórica, ideológica y cultural que no es la del traductor, substanciada, esa percepción, en un entramado lingüístico y semántico que tampoco es el suyo. El texto original representa únicamente una de las “traducciones” posibles de la experiencia de la realidad del autor, estando el traductor obligado a convertir el “texto-traducción” en “traducción-texto”, inevitablemente ambivalente, porque, después de haber comenzado captando la experiencia de la realidad objeto de su atención, el traductor tiene que realizar el trabajo mayor de transportarla intacta al entramado lingüístico y semántico de la realidad (otra) para la que tiene el encargo de traducir, respetando, al mismo tiempo, el lugar de donde vino y el lugar hacia donde va. Para el traductor, el instante del silencio anterior a la palabra es pues como el umbral de un movimiento “alquímico” en que lo que es necesita transformarse en otra cosa para continuar siendo lo que había sido. El diálogo entre el autor y el traductor, en la relación entre el texto que es y el texto que será, no es solo entre dos personalidades particulares que han de completarse, es sobre todo un encuentro entre dos culturas colectivas que deben reconocerse.

And now for the translation that talks about "translation":

To write is to translate. It always will be. Even when we are using our own language. We transport what we see and feel (supposing that "see" and "feel," as we understand them in general, are something more than words which to us it's relatively possible to express what is "seen" and felt"...) to a conventional code of signs, writing, and we leave to circumstances and to the casualities of communication the responsibility of having it reach the intelligence of the reader, not the integrity of the experience which we propose to transmit (inevitably parceled in as much the reality from which it had fed), instead to the least a shadow from which in the depths of our spirit we know is untranslatable, for example, the pure emotion of an encounter, the bedazzlement of a discovery, that fleeing instant of silence before the word which will remain in memory like the rest of a dream which time will not erase completely.

The job work of a translator will consist, of course, in passing to another language (in the beginning, one's own) that which in the work and in the original language already had been a "translation," to whit, a certain perception of a social, historical, ideological, and cultural reality which is not the translator's, substantiates that perception, in neither a linguistic nor semantic framework which is his own. The original text represents uniquely one os the possible "translations" of the author's reality, being that the translator is obliged to covert the "text-translation" into "translation-text," inevitably ambivalent, because, after having commenced capturing the experience of the reality which is the object of his attention, the translator has to accomplish the greater labor of transporting it intact to the linguistic and semantic framework of reality (other) for which he has the burden of translating, respecting, at the same time the place where it came from and the place to where it's going. For the translator, the instant of silence before the word is well like the shadow of an "alchemical" moment in which that which is needs to transform itself into another thing in order to continue being what it had been. The dialogue between author and translator in the relationship between the text what is and the text what will be is not only between two particular personalities that have to complete it, it is above all an encounter between two collective cultures which ought to recognize it.

In this piece, Saramago notes that the very fact of writing is a form of translation. One cannot render exactly feelings such as uncovering of a mystery or a fortuitious encounter with a dear friend. A writer has to pick and choose from commonly-accepted verbal codes those sounds that emulate to some degree the breadth and depth of emotion. Writers seek to approximate the pure emotions that we experience on a regular basis. But it is but a translation, a carrying over from one, personal idiom/form into another. Inevitably, there is something lost when thoughts and feelings are "translated" into the written medium, with a greater risk of misunderstandings and mistranslations taking place as the medium of communication moves from the personal and transcendent to something that has to be altered in order for it to be processed by others.

Interesting thoughts, to say the least. Sadly, my own "translation" barely covers more than the merest hints of what Saramago says in full. Hopefully, my full, formal translation later will help fill in the blanks.

José Saramago has a posse...err, blog

It's in both Spanish and Portuguese, for those who are curious. It seems he updates it rather frequently, about once every day or two, and he started it back in September. Some interesting points of view he has on a whole host of social and political issues, such as the one I'll post below without translation (sorry, but I have a headache right now and I don't feel like rendering this into really good English translation):

Esa mujer de ciento seis años, Ann Nixon Cooper, que Obama citó en su primer discurso como presidente electo de Estados Unidos, talvez llegue a ocupar un lugar en la galería de los personajes literarios favoritos de los lectores norteamericanos, al lado de aquella otra que, viajando en un autobús, se negó a levantarse para darle el asiento a un blanco. No se ha escrito mucho sobre el heroísmo de las mujeres. De entre lo que Obama nos contó sobre Anne Nixon Cooper no sobresalían actos heroicos, salvo los del vivir cotidiano, pero las lecciones del silencio no tienen que ser menos poderosas que las de la palabra. Ciento seis años viendo pasar el mundo, con sus convulsiones, sus logros y sus fracasos, la falta de piedad o la alegría de estar vivo, a pesar de todo. En la noche pasada esa mujer vio la imagen de uno de los suyos en mil carteles y comprendió, no podía dejar de comprenderlo, que algo nuevo estaba sucediendo. O guardó simplemente en el corazón la imagen repetida, a la espera de que su alegría reciba justificación y confirmación. Los viejos tienen estas cosas, de repente abandonan los lugares comunes y avanzan a contracorriente, haciendo preguntas impertinentes y manteniendo silencios obstinados que enfrían la fiesta. Ann Nixon Cooper sufrió esclavitudes varias, por negra, por mujer, por pobre. Vivió sometida, las leyes podrían haber mudado en el exterior, pero no en sus diversos miedos, porque mira a su alrededor y ve mujeres maltratadas, usadas, humilladas, asesinadas, siempre por hombres. Ve que cobran menos que ellos por los mismos trabajos, que tienen que asumir responsabilidades domésticas que se quedarán en la sombra, a pesar de ser necesarias, ve como les obstaculizan los pasos decididos, y sin embargo siguen caminando, o no se levantan en el autobús, contémoslo una vez más, como aquella mujer negra, Rose Banks, que hizo historia, también.

Ciento seis años viendo pasar el mundo. Quién sabe si lo verá bonito, como mi abuela, poco antes de morir, vieja y hermosa, pobre. Talvez la mujer de la que Obama nos habló anoche sintiera la serenidad de la alegría perfecta, talvez lo sepamos un día. Entretanto felicitemos al presidente electo por haberla sacado de su casa, por haberle prestado un homenaje que ella probablemente no necesita, pero nosotros sí. A medida que Obama iba hablando de Ann Nixon Copper nos dábamos cuenta de que cada palabra o ejemplo nos hacía mejores, más humanos, a la vera de una fraternidad total. De nosotros depende que dure este sentimiento.

And yes, he does know how to use traditional punctuation...

Interesting "easter eggs" in stories

I decided to read the introduction to Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet tonight before going to bed, because I wanted to know more about one of Portugal's greatest writers. What I quickly learned was that he used a multiplicity of pseudonyms, which he called "heteronyms," with each having its own distinct "personality."

One of those happened to be Ricardo Reis. Which of course reminded me of one of the few major books by José Saramago that I had yet to purchase/read, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Now I'm certainly going to have to get that one soon, especially since I've just learned a bit more about the "real" 'Ricardo Reis.'

But what about you? What little things, or "easter eggs" as video gamers call the hidden surprises, have you discovered in reading a book that you thought made for an even more enjoyable experience or perhaps led to discovering a new author?

Jose Saramago, Death's Intermittence

This is a more in-depth post devoted to a book that the majority of this blog's readers will not be able to read, at least not yet. But for those that know of my admiration for Portuguese author José Saramago's works, it will come as no surprise that I found myself thumbing through one of my bookcases (the Spanish-language one) and picking up one of his latest releases in Spanish translation, Las intermitencias de la muerte (The translated title that I gave above is but one way of rendering it). So for those of you wanting to know more about this novel, I'm going to start by giving a lengthy passage from the opener that will showcase Saramago's rather unique writing style (first in Spanish, then in English), before I discuss some of the themes of this novel.

Al día siguiente no murió nadie. El hecho, por absolutamente contrario a las normas de la vida, causó en los espíritus una perturbación enorme, efecto a todas luces justificado, basta recordar que no existe noticia en los cuarenta volúmenes de la historia universal, ni siquiera un caso para muestra, de que alguna vez haya ocurrido un fenómeno semejante, que pasara un día completo, con todas sus pródigas veinticuatro horas, contadas entre diurnas y nocturnas, matutinas y vespertinas, sin que se produjera un fallecimiento por enfermedad, una caída mortal, un suicidio conducido hasta el final, nada de nada, como la palabra nada. Ni siquiera uno de esos accidentes de automóvil tan frecuentes en ocasiones festivas, cuando la alegre irresponsabilidad o el exceso de alcohol se desafían mutuamente en las carreteras para decidir quién va a llegar a la muerte en primer lugar. El fin de año no había dejado tras de sí el habitual y calamitoso reguero de óbitos, como si la vieja átropos de regaño amenazador hubiese decidido envainar la tijera durante un día. Sangre, sin embargo, hubo, y no poca. Desorientados, confusos, horrorizados, dominando a duras penas las náuseas, los bomberos extraían de la amalgama de destrozos míseros cuerpos humanos que, de acuerdo con la lógica matemática de las colisiones, deberían estar muertos y bien muertos, pero que, pese a la gravedad de las heridas y de los traumatismos sufridos, se mantenían vivos y así eran transportados a los hospitales, bajo el sonido dilacerante de las sirenas de las ambulancias.

The next day no one died. This fact, absolutely contrary to the norms of life, caused in the spirits an enormous perturbation, certainly justifiable, enough to recall that no news existed in the forty volumes of the universal history, not even a thing for showing, of a similar phenomenon having occurred at some time, which passed a complete day, with all its prodigious twenty-four hours, counted between daytime and nighttime, matins and vespers, without producing a death by infirmity, a mortal fall, a suicide completed until the end, nothing, absolutely nothing. Not even one of those automobile accidents so frequent on festive occasions, when happy irresponsibility or the excess of alcohol play themselves out of tune on the roadways in order to decide who is going to arrive at death in the first place. The year’s end afterwards hadn’t left the habitual and calamitous trail of obituaries, as if the old, threatening, scolding atrophy had decided to sheathe the scissors during one day. Blood, however, there was, and not a little. Disoriented, confused, horrified, nausea dominating the lasting sorrows, the firemen removed from the amalgamation of miserable ruins human bodies that, of accordance with the mathematical logic of the crashes, ought to be dead and truly dead, but that, despite the graveness of the injuries and the traumas suffered, maintained themselves alive and so they were transported to the hospitals, under the blaring sound of the ambulences.

This section, which comprises the first page and the first part of a very lengthy opening paragraph, illustrates quite well Saramago's writing style, with its use of commas and complex clauses in place of "normal" sentence constructions. As is his wont, Saramago abruptly introduces something that disrupts our typical expectations and makes us question, "What's next?" What's next in a world where Death has decided during the course of a day that enough was enough and that it wouldn't take any more human lives?

Over the course of 274 pages in my Alfaguara Spanish edition, Saramago takes that postulation and stretches it into an indicting statement on the world today. How many organizations, from religious groups to charities, are predicated on the existence of pain, suffering, and a fear of dying? In a graying First World, what would all of these old and decrepit bodies still surviving mean? Would a society such as the one in which a great many of us live today manage to survive such a shock to the expected order of the universe?

What Saramago concludes from this is rather pessimistic, but yet realistic. The horror that one feels in passages such as the rescue of the bodies from a horrific car crash/explosion is found throughout the novel and its cumulative effect is to cause the reader to rethink and to question just about everything that he or she might take for granted about the societies in which we live. Such an act is a remarkable accomplishment indeed and this is one of Saramago's better story-fables. I can only hope that this novel will be released shortly in a much better translation than the rough one I have given above. This is one Nobel Prize-winning author who deserves a wider reading audience in the spec fic circles, as so many of his ideas are generated from the same sources as those we see in genre fiction. And if you happen to be like me and are able to read Spanish, there is no excuse - go out and buy and read the damn thing now!

Publication Date: (Spanish) November 2005, Tradeback; January 2007, Paperback.

José Saramago: Un hombre no duplicado?

Recently, I've been finding myself recommending José Saramago to readers at various forums, urging them to consider his body of work and occasionally mentioning (knowing this to be a double-edged sword with some) that he won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. I just thought that I would briefly write about some of the reasons why I've been urging readers to try Saramago, not to mention explain why I classify Saramago among the greats of 'speculative fiction' rather than just leaving his name safely esconsed within the oddly separated 'Literature' section of a bookstore.

I have read Saramago's works in both English and Spanish translation (his native language being Portuguese, with translations into Spanish being handled by Saramago's wife, Pilar del Río) and thematically, there is a lot that will alternately appeal to and repel the unsuspecting reader. A great many of his stories revolve not just around 'what if' situations, but 'why not' scenarios as well. One example would be the controversial 1989 novel, El Evangelio según Jesucristo (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ). In this novel, Saramago explores the possibility of a Christ being not just fully human and divine but fully human and divine in a way that includes a bit of resentment toward God the Father and a more sympathetic version of the Temptation than what is contained in traditional Christian accounts.

Another example of his fertile mind at word can be found in the 1995 masterpiece, Ensayo sobre la ceguera (Blindness). Imagine a whole nation losing its way, its sight...literally. A word filled only with a white blindness and human stumbling. What would such a world be like? How would the people change? Are there allegories for our world, for our understanding of what is transpiring? What ultimately becomes 'real' and what is consigned to the realm of the 'irrational' in a world without sight? Saramago here challenges the reader to consider this as the tale moves on and more and more people lose their sight and perhaps, themselves.

A third novel of his that I enjoyed was La caverna (The Cave), published in 2001. This is a more straightforward tale, one dealing with a Wal-Mart-like shopping/commercial center called simply The Center and how its rapaciousness affects the lives of a simple potter and his family. Yet within this tale, there is a mystery, a symbolism that is more than just a simple allegory. For the title refers to another, more famous cave that has been hypothesized and argued for millenia...

And the last novel of his that I've read is 2003's El hombre duplicado (The Duplicated Man). It is on the surface a relatively simple tale of a doppelgänger and one man's quest to meet his duplicate, but as tends to be the case with Saramago's stories, there is a wealth of speculation and doubt that bubbles under the surface. The conclusions reached are interesting, the impact rather disturbing to this reader, who enjoyed this book greatly.

But these brief paragraphs only speak of the surface features of Saramago's work; they do not address the originality contained within each page. Saramago does something very risky with his prose, something which I believe was done in part to match what is transpiring within the text: He abandons almost completely typical sentence/paragraph/punctuation style, favoring instead page-long sentences with a myriad numbers of clauses to substitute for sentences. Oftentimes, the paragraph breaks represent complete changes in thought and there are no quotation marks or emdashes to represent dialogue; all is found contained within a labyrinthine forest of commas. But yet oddly, this does not ruin the pace of the reading at all - no, the punctuational/syntaxical structure serves to focus the reader's attention on the text at hand, lending indeed an added sense of 'otherness' to the tale being consumed.

It is for this originality and how it plays out within his tales that I consider Saramago to be one of the greatest living novelists. How odd that this 83 year-old author did not become famous until his 60s. But yet there is a vitality there that belies the author's age, leading to works that I believe will be timeless and challenging for as long as one human being harbors doubts about the hows and whys of this quaint universe around us. Hopefully, there will be others who will try to challenge themselves and their readers' perspectives of themselves and the universe(s) around them the way Saramago bends and warps all around him.

For an interesting interview (translated into English over his latest novel, Las intermitencias de la muerte), go to this link to read more.