José Saramago - The Collected Novels of José Saramago

Baltasar & Blimunda (1987)

A heretical priest during the time of the Spanish Inquisition is building a flying machine, with three people to help him: Domenico Scarlatti and a pair of lovers, Baltasar, a one-handed soldier, and Blimunda, the slender daughter of a witch.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1991)

The year is 1936, the city, Lisbon. Ricardo Reis, a middle-aged doctor and poet, has returned to his native country after sixteen years in Brazil. He spends hours walking the steep rain-filled streets.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1994)

A deft psychological portrait of a savior who is at once the Son of God and a young man of this earth.

The Stone Raft (1995)

One day the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the rest of the continent and drifts away into the Atlantic Ocean.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1997)

A proofreader alters a key word in an account of the 1147 siege of Lisbon—then under Moorish rule—by crusaders. This uncharacteristic decision will lead him into an affair of the heart that changes the course of European history.

Blindness (1998)

A city is struck by an epidemic of “white blindness.” Only a doctors wife is spared, and she must guide seven strangers through the dangerous new circumstances.

The Tale of the Unknown Island (1999)

This is the story of a man who asks the king for a boat and of the woman who decides to follow him on his adventure.

All the Names (2000)

Senhor José, a low-level clerk in the Central Registry, chances upon the records of a young woman and becomes obsessed with the idea of finding her.

The Cave (2002)

An elderly potter struggles to make a living. His son-in-law, a security guard at the Center, is assigned to guard an excavation-in-progress that will change the family’s life forever.

The Double (2004)

Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, a high school history teacher, rents a video and is surprised to discover an extra in the film looks exactly like him. It is, in fact, his double.

Seeing (2006)

On election day in the capital, all the citizens rush out to vote, but they leave their ballots mysteriously blank.

Death with Interruptions (2008)

Death sits in her chilly apartment, where she lives alone with her scythe and filing cabinets, and contemplates her experiment: what if people stopped dying?

The Elephant’s Journey (2010)

Based on a true story, the tale of an elephant who walked from Lisbon to Vienna in 1551.

IT’S FITTING THAT the novels of José Saramago should have an electronic edition, a virtual presence, for it was Saramago who first spoke of virtual literature —a fiction that “seems to have detached itself from reality in order better to reveal its invisible mysteries” (The Notebook). He credits Jorge Luis Borges with the invention of this genre, but he himself brought to it the one quality of greatness that Borges’s fictions lack: a passionate and compassionate interest in ordinary people and everyday human life.

We probably don’t really need any more categories, but virtual literature might be a useful one, differing from science fiction and speculative fiction with their extrapolative bent, fantasy with its wholly imagined realities, satire with its meliorative indignation, magic realism which is indigenous to South America, and modernist realism with its fixation on the banal. I see virtual literature sharing ground with all these genres, as indeed they all overlap, yet differing from them insofar as its aim is, as Saramago put it, the revelation of mystery.

In his books, this is revelation of the most secular and unpretentious kind—no grand epiphanies, only a gathering and slow arrival of light, as in the hour before sunrise. The mystery revealed is that of daylight, of seeing the world clearly, the mystery that happens literally every day.

Saramago died in the summer of 2010, at eighty-seven. He wrote his first major novel when he was over sixty, and finished his last, Cain, a little before he died.

I have to go on speaking of him in the present tense, he lives so vividly in his writings, these works of a “senior citizen,” our patronizing euphemism for the dreaded words “old man.” His extraordinary gifts of invention and narration, his radical intelligence, wit, humor, good sense, and goodness of heart, will shine out to anyone who values such qualities in an artist, but his age gives his art a singular edge. He has news for us all, including old readers tired of hearing the young or the wannabe young telling us the stuff we used to tell everybody when we were young. Saramago has left all the heavy breathing decades behind him. He has grown up. Heresy as it may seem to the cultists of youth, he is more than he was when he was young, more of a man, a person, an artist. He’s been farther and learned more. He is the only novelist of my generation who tells me what I didn’t know, or rather, what I didn’t know I knew: the only one I still learn from. He had the time and the courage to earn that subtle and unpretentious kind of understanding we call, inadequately, wisdom. But it’s not the glib reassurance often labeled wisdom. He’s anything but reassuring. Though he doesn’t parrot the counsels of despair, he has little confidence in that kindly trickster, hope.

Radical means “of the root,” and Saramago was a deeply rooted man. Accepting the Nobel Prize in a king’s court, he spoke with passion and simplicity of his grandparents in the plains of the Alentejo, peasants, very poor people, to him a lifelong, beloved presence and moral example. He was radically conservative in the true meaning of the word, which has nothing to do with the reactionary quacking of the neocons, whom he despised. An atheist and socialist, he spoke out, and suffered for, not mere beliefs or opinions, but rational convictions, formed on a clear ethical framework which could be reduced almost to a sentence, but a sentence of immensely complex political, social, and spiritual implication: it is wrong to hurt people weaker than you are.

His international reputation has suffered most from his steadfast opposition to Israeli aggression against Palestine. His demand that Israel, remembering the suffering of the Jews, cease to inflict the same kind of suffering on its neighbors, has cost him the approval of those who conflate opposition to Israel’s aggressive policy with anti-Semitism. To him religion doesn’t enter into it, while Jewish history simply supports his argument: it is a matter of the powerful hurting those weaker than they are.

Saramago famously said, “God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence” (The Notebook). He isn’t often so dramatically epigrammatic. I would describe his usual attitude to God as inquisitive, incredulous, humorous, and patient—about as far from the ranting professional atheist as you can get. Yet he is an atheist, anticlerical, and distrustful of religion; and the potentates of piety of course detest him, a dislike he cordially returns. In his fascinating Notebook (blogs from 2008 and 2009) he castigates the mufti of Saudi Arabia, who, as he says, by legalizing marriage for girls of ten, legalized pederasty, and the pope of Rome, so reluctant to condemn pederasty among his priests—again a matter of the powerful hurting the defenseless. Saramago’s atheism is of a piece with his feminism, his fierce outrage at the mistreatment, underpayment, and devaluing of women, the way men misuse the power over them given them by every society. And this is all of a piece with his socialism. He is on the side of the underdog.