Terra Infirma

Before he won the Nobel Prize last year, few outside Portugal had heard of Jose Saramago. This wasn’t the fault of Harcourt Brace in the United States or of Harvill and Carcanet in England, which have published translations of half a dozen of his major novels (all now available in paperback). To read these is to instantly apprehend two cardinal facts about their author. He is clearly one of the most exciting and original novelists alive today; and in Giovanni Pontiero--who, sadly, died just after completing the first English draft of Saramago’s “Blindness”--he had the good fortune to find one of the century’s most brilliant translators.

Saramago’s narrative style--discursive, philosophical, vivid, carrying endless characters and their sayings along in its flow like big-river flotsam--is marvelously transposed to English by Pontiero’s endless capacity for verbal pastiche and his acute ear for tone and nuance. In one sense the narrator of a Saramago novel is always Saramago: Far from invisible and impersonal, he provides a cool, witty, ironic running commentary on the events he describes, co-opting his reader by turns as fellow traveler, literary companion, sexual confidant and, occasionally, moral witness.

The novels are extraordinarily varied. “The History of the Siege of Lisbon” takes the recovery of that city from the Moors in 1147 and turns it into a lethal (and often hilarious) indictment of conventional historiography and conventional Christian pieties. “The Stone Raft” plays with the social possibilities were the Iberian Peninsula to break loose from Europe and float off as a mobile island. (Yes, Saramago does dabble in magical realism.) “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” is a ferocious theological shocker in which the protagonist turns out to be the set-up victim of a heavenly con job. “Baltasar and Blimunda,” set in Lisbon in 1711, tells a charming, picaresque love story against a background of plague, flagellants, witch burnings, aristocratic vice and the shadow of the Inquisition. “Blindness” invokes a mysterious and highly contagious epidemic of “white blindness” that descends on a city and the ugly hysteria in quarantined victims and city officials alike that results.

So where is the author himself coming from? Jose Saramago was born in 1922 and blossomed comparatively late. An autodidact, he started off in various manual jobs, then turned to journalism. In 1977 came his first novel, the oddly titled “Manual of Painting and Calligraphy.” Narrated by a second-class portrait painter, it shows in embryo Saramago’s subsequent obsession with self-discovery and the confusing interpenetrations of art and life. Also, significantly, it was written in 1973, at the very end of the dictatorial regime of Premier Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, which fell a few months later (as did that of the military junta in Greece: 1974 was a good year for democracy). It’s not hard to guess at the underlying social and political forces that give the work of this passionate unapologetic (if barely recognizable) Communist such intensity and edge.

Which brings us, at last, to “The Tale of the Unknown Island.” This slim fable is not the book that intelligent readers who want to discover Saramago should start on: It would almost certainly put them off. We have here a simple, not to say simpliste, allegory. A man goes to the king’s house and petitions for a boat. The king ignores him until he is pushed into hearing the request by his cleaning woman. The man wants to be granted a boat to discover the Unknown Island. Much laughter, but public opinion supports him, and he gets his wish. The cleaning woman joins him: Neither has any real idea of how to sail, but they go aboard regardless. From this point, luckily, the man’s dreams take over. The ship sprouts crops and farmyard animals; he and the cleaning woman, now lovers, name the ship the Unknown Island, and it puts to sea in search of itself.

My first, perhaps unworthy, thought on reading this squib was that Saramago, having finally got the Nobel Prize he so richly deserved, felt an uncontrollable urge to play a joke on his new reading public by presenting it with an elegantly produced fable that meant absolutely nothing and then seeing whether readers would swallow it. I suppose one could say that it’s about the shortcomings of patronage for genius (since of course the genius doesn’t know what he’s looking for until he’s found it), with the cleaning woman as vox populi; but the denouement is a dream and--in contrast to the Alice books--no one wakes up. Read a couple of Saramago’s great novels first and only then come back to “The Tale of the Unknown Island.”