Reading Saramago during the collapse (Part 1)

A few months ago, Brian handed me a copy of The Double by Jose Saramago and said it was a must read. Odd, compelling, a book that really sticks – and unique in both voice and perspective. When you read as much as we do, unique is prize in itself, so of course I read it – letting both the disquiet and delight of the story enter me in such a way that I have carried it around inside me ever since. I followed that with Blindness, then The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, the Tale of the Unknown Island, and most recently, The Stone Raft.

And there are many more to come (hooray!).

Although each of Saramago’s works are tuned to a slightly different key, they all deal in some way with crisis. Social, personal, spiritual, geological, geographical, political – his characters are thrust into worlds gone slightly askance, and their responses tested. As in any exam, there are some who fail utterly, and others who pass with flying colours – most people muddling along somewhere in between just trying to figure out what question exactly they are trying to answer. An honest portrait of humanity is something I have come to expect from this author, a looking glass if one can only imagine their own responses to the scenarios Saramago presents.

I have read these works described as “grounded magical realism” which is true if it means to give more weight to the real, and less to the magic. The magical is the minor feature here, unlike the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but it does exist and even small amounts of it compell his characters to act, to move, to forget themselves in their search for answers or survival. Depends on the book how far these stories go, how frightening or beautiful they become.

For several months now I have been contemplating a blog post about Blindness, and its instructiveness given the current economic situation and state of the world. And since reading The Stone Raft, I have felt it too has a lesson which merits some discussion given the context of our times. This is not because Saramago is writing for this exact moment, but because for the last thirty years he has been writing about moments like this over and over. Those during which everything starts to slide in the opposite direction, those in which even mundane events can appear like a gift to guide us through.

This is simply the introduction to a series of posts that will grow as I read more of his works and as the economic crisis deepens and changes even the “safest” of countries, challenges even the most secure of people. We are only here at the beginning of that tale, the real travelers to Saramago’s fictions – so it’s a curiosity to compare the two.

I will warn you now that I can’t have this discussion without plot spoilers, so if you are adamantly against revealed twists and endings then please don’t read any of the posts to follow.