José Saramago: The Notebook

Leora Skolkin-Smith reviews José Saramago's The Notebook.

In September of 2008, at the age of eighty-five, Jose Saramago began to write a blog. His wife, watching him suffer the restlessness and anxiety of advanced age, had suggested to him that he try doing something challenging, as his traveling and own writing were slowing down. Unlike so many writers who viewed the approaching age of the Internet as threatening, Saramago wrote: “Could it be, to put it more clearly, that it’s here (on the Internet) that we most closely resemble one another? Are we more companionable when we write on the Internet? I have no answers. I’m merely asking the questions. And I enjoy writing here now. I don’t know whether it’s more democratic, I only know that I feel just the same as the young man with the wild hair and round-rimmed glasses, in his early twenties, who was asking the large questions. For a blog no doubt.”

Saramago viewed blogging as a new collectivism, egalitarian by its very nature. This kind of sentiment was not unusual for Saramago, as his work comes from a broad range of issues about power, social status, and social organization. “The one from and into which all others flow is the question of power,” he once wrote, “and the theoretical and practical problem we are presented with is identifying who holds it, discovering how they attained it, checking what use they make of it, and by what means and for what end.” The phenomenon of the Internet was, for Saramago, a necessary cleansing of the power structures inherent in print and other media, and reading this collection of essays (most of which are raw, urgent, and fragmentary) it seemed that the Nobel Prize winner wished to be a member of the clamorous cyber population, not a distant, superior observer from the upper ranks and echelons of literature and ideas. For him, blogging was a form of citizenship and a means, perhaps, that might engender a new moral conscience, fostering meaningful (albeit sometimes irrational and strident), global dialogues.

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José Saramago: The Elephant’s Journey

Richard Elliott reviews José Saramago's The Elephant’s Journey.

The late Portuguese writer José Saramago was a master at combining the fantastic with the banal, the metaphoric with the everyday. There’s always a sense in his prose that, whatever the story he might be telling us, there are a multitude of stories framing it, running alongside it, or visible just beyond its borders. Saramago wants us to know that those stories, which are sometimes really observations and sometimes fantastical retellings of official history, need to be included in the story he is telling us, such that we imagine, or he lets us believe we imagine, that what is unfolding in the labyrinth of his text is one, unending metastory. Frequently, in his wandering, loosely punctuated prose—sometimes described as magical realism, sometimes as stream-of-consciousness, but perhaps just as easily thought of as the flow of history running all around us and threatening to flood the present—he will take us sidestepping through the fragile walls that separate these universes, giving us a glimpse of the bigger picture before shuttling us back to the scene in which this particular story is taking place.

The Elephant’s Journey, published in Portuguese in 2008, was one of Saramago’s last works. The journey of the title is inspired by historical events that occurred in 1551, when King João III of Portugal decided, on the advice of his Austrian wife, to give Archduke Maximilian the belated wedding gift of an elephant. Solomon, the elephant, and Subhro, his keeper or mahout, have been languishing in Lisbon since being brought back from Goa two years prior. It’s decided that both will travel to Valladolid in Spain, to meet with the Archduke, and then proceed with him to Rosas on the East coast, then across the Mediterranean to Genoa in Italy, and on to the imperial city of Vienna.

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José Saramago: The Elephant’s Journey

J. M. Ledgard reviews José Saramago's The Elephant's Journey.

The Portuguese writer José Saramago died in June at the age of 87. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, having peaked as a writer later in life. His prose is impish and subtle enough to bear comparison with Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, even if he lacked their scope. Saramago was a Communist. He believed there was a new totalitarianism of multinational companies. “To be a Portuguese Stalinist” well into the 21st century “means you’re simply not living in the real world,” the critic Harold Bloom has said. True enough. Yet when Saramago picked up his pen, a richer world was made.

“The Elephant’s Journey,” Saramago’s slender new posthumous novel, is a road trip. There’s no sex, not much violence, no God-awful narrative arc, and the insights arrive as gently as a skiff pulling up to a riverbank. Confounding though it is for me to say (believing as I do the mind of the apparatchik to be the nastiest soup), it would be hard to more highly recommend a novel to be downed in a single draft.

Saramago disliked America and cars — he once said that being in a car was like being in a spaceship that protects you from everything — so his road trip is naturally dustier, with ox carts on sunburnt plains, cuirassiers, swirling mists, wolves and snows. It is 1551. João III of Portugal gives an elephant from his Lisbon menagerie to Archduke Maximilian of Austria. The elephant is called Solomon. His mahout is named Subhro. Together, whispering to each other a tongue known only to them and born of solitude, they journey on foot from Lisbon to Valladolid, to Catalonia, by sea to Genoa, on to Venice, over the Alps, arriving at Innsbruck on the feast day of Epiphany in 1552, before continuing by barge down the rivers Inn and Danube toward Vienna.

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José Saramago: The Elephant’s Journey

Steven G. Kellman reviews José Saramago's The Elephant’s Journey.

The distance between Lisbon and Vienna is 1,429 miles as the crow flies. As the elephant trudges, it is a more arduous expedition. How do you convey an Asian pachyderm from the Portuguese capital to the seat of the Habsburg empire? Very carefully, especially if the beast is a wedding present from King João III of Portugal to the Archduke Maximilian and his bride, Maria, daughter of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. In a brief prologue to The Elephant's Journey, José Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Laureate who died last June, explains that he learned about this extraordinary transport when, visiting Salzburg, he encountered a set of carvings commemorating the event. He was inspired to write a whimsical novel about how, in 1551, a four-ton elephant named Solomon but renamed Suleiman was brought from Portugal to Spain and then by boat to Italy and up through the Alps to Austria.

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José Saramago: The Elephant’s Journey

Richard Eder reviews José Saramago's The Elephant’s Journey.

José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and Nobelist, has ended his journey with another one: a 16th-century trudge from Lisbon to Vienna by an elephant named Solomon, a present from the Portuguese King João III to Archduke Maximilian, heir to the Holy Roman Empire. “The Elephant’s Journey,” written not long before Saramago’s death in June, displays his unique mix of absurdity, sudden logic, comedy shading to melancholy, and digression that tunnels up into unexpected purpose.
Guided by Subhro, Solomon’s discursive Indian mahout, and escorted by a detachment of Portuguese soldiers, the elephant, who is allowed an occasional discursiveness of his own, travels north to Castelo Rodrigo, crosses into Spain, and makes his way to Valladolid, where he is turned over to Maximilian. The procession, lavishly swollen by Austrian courtiers and troops, continues by sea to Genoa, crosses the Alps over the icy Brenner Pass, and is triumphantly welcomed to Vienna.

The journey is based on a historical event; and perhaps Saramago has forfeited a little of his power by it: His greatest novels invent their own history. “Blindness” is an astonishing parable of what happens when suddenly nobody can see; in “The Stone Raft,” Spain and Portugal break off from Europe and go floating away; in “The History of the Siege of Lisbon,” a proofreader’s mischievous insertion of “not” drastically alters three centuries of Portuguese life. In “Elephant,” the extraordinary story is very roughly tied to the real; that is, it lacks some of the unhampered detonations of Saramago’s magical realism. Nonetheless it is for the most part a delight.

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José Saramago: The Elephant's Journey

The Romanian edition of José Saramago's The Elephant's Journey.

José Saramago: The Notebook

Tom Payne reviews José Saramago's The Notebook.

Not everybody likes winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Becket thought it a catastrophe; Doris Lessing made it clear that she could have done without it; when the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska won it, Seamus Heaney said: “Poor Wislawa!” These days it seems almost unwriterly to win the most honourable prize a writer can win. Harold Pinter seemed all too chuffed. But why not? It tends to be a lifetime achievement award.
The Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who died last week, received it in 1998 for the work of two prolific decades. Not even the Nobel Prize was going to stop him. Like Pinter, he welcomed it. He tended not to show off without self-deprecation, but in his last published work, The Notebook, he let slip, thrice, that he was pleased to have won the prize.
Good for him. Saramago was a politically committed writer, and was able to use his global fame to plead cases dear to him. Or, as he put it in The Notebook: “It is true that I am better known as a writer, but there are also some people who… believe what I say as a common citizen is of interest to them.” And for a year, until last August, he wrote a blog.
Intellectuals in their ninth decade are allowed to write blogs, although, given that Saramago often wrote page-length paragraphs, he was never likely to do Twitter.

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José Saramago: The Notebook

Thomas McGonigle reviews José Saramago's The Notebook

What makes this exceptional is that Saramago was a formally demanding writer in love with unparagraphed prose. Yet he had the ability to hold us in his grasp nonetheless. His narrators were obsessives who convincingly took us away from everyday reality, inhabiting instead a familiar but very strange world.
In "Blindness," an epidemic of sorts strikes an unnamed city, where the vision of the characters fades to a kind of milky white. "Seeing" — its successor, set in the same city and published in 2006 — involves a voters' revolt in which during an election, the vast majority of citizens cast ballots that are blank.
This is allegorical writing, but it gets at the most basic issues of control and resistance, power and personal autonomy. When Saramago rooted his writing in actual detail, he had a revelatory power that was nearly unrivaled, but his main inclination was toward the parable, the slipperiest of all literary tendencies.
Saramago's final book, "The Notebook" — published just two months before his death — does not represent him at his best. Instead, it is an opportunistic selection from the author's blog.
Grab-bag is a handy expression for such a collection, and while the author on display in these pages can be attractive and sympathetic, there is a distracting undercurrent that insidiously undermines his authority.
It all depends where you look. Some of the writing here reflects the wondrous integrity of his previous books

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José Saramago 1922-2010

Todos sabemos que cada dia que nasce é o primeiro para uns e será o último para outros e que, para a maioria é só um dia mais.
[We all know that each new day is the first for some and will be the last for others, and for most is just one more day]

José Saramago

Nobel laureate José Saramago died today here are some reactions.

The Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who explored Portugal's troubled political identity in a series of novels published over the last four decades and won the Nobel prize for literature in 1998, died today at the age of 87.
An outspoken atheist and communist, he challenged the orthodoxies of post-dictatorship Portuguese life with novels such as Baltasar and Blimunda, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and All the Names, but reached his widest audience with the 2008 film of his 1995 novel, Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles. He spent the last years of his life in Lanzarote after the Portuguese government had vetoed the nomination of his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ for an EU literary prize in 1992.

guardian.co.uk

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, died on Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87.
The cause was multiple organ failure after a long illness, the José Saramago Foundation said in an announcement on its Web site, josesaramago.org.
A tall, commandingly austere man with a dry, schoolmasterly manner, Mr. Saramago gained international acclaim for novels like "Baltasar and Blimunda" and "Blindness." (A film adaptation of "Blindness" by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles was released in 2008.)

The New York Times

Jose Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in literature for early novels that explored historical themes from unconventional angles and later works in which inexplicable events threaten society’s underpinnings, has died. He was 87.
The writer died earlier today at his home in Lanzarote, Spain, after a lengthy illness, according to the website of the Jose Saramago Foundation.
Saramago, the only Portuguese winner of the literary prize, was 60 before he wrote most of the novels for which he was honored, having worked as a car mechanic, civil servant, production manager in a publishing company and newspaper editor before becoming a full-time writer.

businessweek.com

Jose Saramago, who became the first Portuguese-language winner of the Nobel Literature prize although his popularity at home was dampened by his unflinching support for Communism, blunt manner and sometimes difficult prose style, died Friday.
Saramago, 87, died at his home in Lanzarote, one of Spain's Canary Islands, of multi-organ failure after a long illness, the Jose Saramago Foundation said.
"The writer died in the company of his family, saying goodbye in a serene and placid way," the foundation said.
Saramago was an outspoken man who antagonized many, and moved to the Canary Islands after a public spat in 1992 with the Portuguese government, which he accused of censorship.
His 1998 Nobel accolade was nonetheless widely cheered in his homeland after decades of the award eluding writers of a language used by some 170 million people around the world.

The Associated Press

O prémio Nobel da Literatura de 1998 faleceu aos 87 anos na sua casa na ilha espanhola de Lanzarote.

O escritor português, que recebeu o prémio Nobel da Literatura e o Prémio Camões, deixa uma vasta obra literária, da qual se destaca, entre outros, os livros Memorial do Convento, O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo e Levantado do Chão.

O seu romance Ensaio sobre a Cegueira foi adaptado ao cinema pelo realizador brasileiro Fernando Meirelles numa película co-produzida por três países

tsf.pt

El escritor, poeta y dramaturgo portugués José Saramago murió en España, a los 87 años.
El fallecimiento fue informado esta mañana por su editor Zeferino Coelho, que precisó que el literato murió en su casa de Lanzarote, en las islas Canarias. Su salud se había deteriorado en los últimos meses.
Saramago ganó el Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1998 y su última novela, Caín, se publicó el año pasado. En su prolífera obra se destacan: La balsa de piedra (1986), El Evangelio según Jesucristo (1991), Ensayo sobre la ceguera (1995), Todos los nombres (1997), El hombre duplicado (2002) y Ensayo sobre la lucidez (2004).

lanacion.com

O escritor faleceu às 13 horas locais (8 horas de Brasília), segundo sua esposa e tradutora, Pilar del Rio. Ainda de acordo com ela, Saramago havia passado uma noite tranquila e, depois de tomar café da manhã com a mulher, começou a passar mal e faleceu em pouco tempo.
O autor recebeu o prêmio máximo da Literatura em 1998. Segundo a premiação, Saramago "nos permitiu mais uma vez apreender uma realidade ilusória por meio de parábolas sustentadas pela imaginação, pela compaixão e pela ironia".

estadao.com.br

Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, the Nobel laureate best known for controversial works such as Blindness and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, has died at age 87.
Saramago died at his home in Lanzarote, one of Spain's Canary Islands, his publisher, Zeferino Coelho, said Friday.
He suffered multiple organ failure after a long illness, according to the Jose Saramago Foundation.
"The writer died in the company of his family, saying goodbye in a serene and placid way," the foundation said.

cbcnews.com

Bibliotherapy

José Saramago prescribed in bibliotherapy.

As I made my way through my reading prescription I realised that all the novels were fundamentally optimistic. In Blindness by José Saramago, for example, the world descends into chaos but there’s light and love at the end of the tunnel.

I started to feel more positive. When faced with moving house, I viewed it as an exciting step rather than a massive chore. Bibliotherapy isn’t a miracle cure but it has shown me that a novel can literally change your life.

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Jose Saramago: The Notebook

 
Chris Dolan reviews José Saramago's The Notebook.

These notes, I found, are not simply a blog but contributions to the much more ambitious Saramago Foundation, which attempts, in its founder’s words, to “bring a new dynamic to cultural life in Portugal”. There are many more voices than Saramago’s given an airing in the site, and in The Notebook some of that desire for dialogue, that generosity of spirit, comes across, too. Saramago comments on events his foundation has organised – presentations by Baltasar Garzón, celebrations of the work of Carlos Fuentes and Fernando Pessoa. If nothing else, the English translations of these blogs might pique an Anglo-American interest in writers and thinkers from the Hispanic world.

At 87, Saramago leads a busy life, ­travelling, overseeing the publication of his novel (O Viagem do Elefante, available here next year) and putting the finishing touches to the one after that – Caim; he does radio talk-ins and hosts events at his Foundation and, it seems, almost any other organisation willing to let him talk about justice and writing and writers. The energy, passion and continuing political anger of the man glows brightly throughout the Notebook.

He signs off from his blog, saying he needs time to dedicate himself to yet another book – but I checked this morning, and he’s written several notes on the site since. There’s no stopping the man, thankfully.

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José Saramago - Cain

Last Monday José Saramago launched his new novel "Cain" with a very critical view of the Bible.

 

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.

Roman Catholic Church leaders accused the 86-year-old of a publicity stunt.

The book is an ironic retelling of the Biblical story of Cain, Adam and Eve's son who killed his younger brother Abel.

At the launch event in the northern Portuguese town of Penafiel on Sunday, Saramago said he did not think the book would offend Catholics "because they do not read the Bible".

"The Bible is a manual of bad morals (which) has a powerful influence on our culture and even our way of life. Without the Bible, we would be different, and probably better people," he was quoted as saying by the news agency Lusa. Read More

This is not a new situation, in 1992 when he released "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ", the book was even banned from running to a literary prize by a member of the portuguese government close to the catholic church.

 

José Saramago's new novel

José Saramago's new novel "Cain" will be presented in October.
A return to biblical themes almost 20 years after The Gospel According to Jesus Christ(1991).

Portuguese author Jose Saramago takes an irreverent look at the Old Testament in his new novel, “Cain,” in which he absolves that Biblical villain of the killing of his brother and puts the blame squarely on God.

His Portuguese-language publisher, Zeferino Coelho, will present the novel at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October and the title is scheduled for release in bookstores in Portugal, Latin America and Spain by the end of that month.

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Latin American Literature

The World's Largest Flower

A Maior Flor do Mundo (The World's Largest Flower) is a short film directed by Juan Pablo Etcheverry based on the children book written by José Samarago.

A Maior Flor do Mundo from Fundação Jose Saramago on Vimeo.

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Latin American Literature

Jose Saramago: The Elephant’s Journey

José Saramago's "The Elephant's Journey" to be published in 2010.

On the heels of the runaway success of the Sara Gruen novel "Water for Elephants," another writer is about to take aim at the best-seller list with a novel populated with elephants — only this time it's the Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago, who we assume will have a slightly different take on the subject.

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Jose Saramago: A Viagem do Elefante

José Saramago as just published his new novel "A Viagem do Elefante"
(The Elephant's Journey).

Saramago built this new novel from an historical fact the story of
Salomon an elephant that crossed half Europe in the XVI th century as
a gift from John III, King of Portugal to Archduke Maximilian II of
Austria.
I'm personally very curious about this new experience in an historical
novel 26 years after "Baltasar and Blimunda".




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Portuguese Literature

Interview with Jose Saramago

Elizabeth Nash interviews José Saramago.

Portugal's Nobel Literature laureate Jose Saramago has announced the completion of his latest work "The Elephant's Journey", based on the real-life epic journey of an Indian elephant named Solomon who travelled from Lisbon to Vienna in the 16th century.

Saramago's achievement marks a rebirth for the veteran writer, 86, whose flagging health, for which he received hospital treatment late last year, sounded alarm bells in the literary world.

The author describes the book as "a story rather than a novel". It will be published shortly in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, and opens with the line: "However incongruous it may seem..."

Saramago has been captivated by the tale for last ten years, ever since he made a visit to Austria and went to eat by chance in a Salzburg restaurant called The Elephant, the author says in a long email interview published recently in the Spanish press.

The Elephant's Journey is filled with characters, some of them real historical figures, others anonymous fictional creations: "they are people the members of this travelling caravan encounter on their journey, and with whom they share perplexities, efforts and the harmonious joy of a roof over their heads".

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Portuguese Literature

Jose Saramago: Seeing

Chiron reviews José Saramago's Seeing.



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Portuguese Literature

Jose Saramago: Death At Intervals

Lindy Burleigh reviews José Saramago's Death At Intervals.

'Now life is truly beautiful,' proclaim the citizens of the unnamed fictional country in José Saramago's new novel, when suddenly, one New Year's Day, people stop dying. Granted, it's an implausible scenario, but we are asked to take nothing seriously, except for the author himself.

We know, too, that Saramago is not going to stick to the rules, because he doesn't use capital letters.

The big idea is that the 'absence of death' doesn't make for an earthly paradise. In fact, it causes bureaucratic chaos and societal breakdown.

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Portuguese Literature

José Saramago: The Double

Rick Moody reviews José Saramago's The Double.

The Double, Saramago's newly translated novel, is a case in point. Published in his native Portugal four years after the author received the Nobel, the novel is easy to summarize: A secondary school history teacher with the musty old name of Tertuliano Máximo Afonso finds upon renting a forgettable videotape that he has an exact double, one Daniel Santa-Clara, whose job it apparently is to perform bit parts in a myriad of forgettable B-films. Beyond their professional differences, Tertuliano and Daniel (whose real name is António Claro) are otherwise completely identical, down to their date of birth, their moles, and even their scars. The course of the novel concerns Tertuliano's attempts to locate and meet Daniel/António, the bad blood that emerges from their meeting, and the fiendish plots they then initiate against each other. I won't ruin the end, which is quite moving and features at least one considerably surprising plot twist.

As it is with Saramago's best novels (in the United States, they are probably reckoned to be Blindness, a true masterpiece in my view, and The Cave), The Double seems to have a parabolic, or allegorical, layer, whereby it's possible to view the fabulism of the central conceit as standing in for something particular. Unlike in dream logic, in which the play of interpretation is imperative to arriving at understanding, in Saramago's parabolic world blindness tends to mean one or two things exactly, and the plight of the blind has a clearly representational, if not mimetic, flavor: The modern world, Blindness argues, exists as it does in this story. Saramago's work is not surreal, therefore, in the sense that we might understand it from Breton, or, to take a more recent case, Rikki Ducornet. Saramago is more like the poetry of Bunyan, or perhaps like Swift.

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Portuguese Literature