Jose Saramago Speaks

How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o’clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife. My mother’s parents lived on this scarcity, on the small breeding of pigs that after weaning were sold to the neighbours in our village of Azinhaga in the province of Ribatejo. Their names were Jerónimo Meirinho and Josefa Caixinha and they were both illiterate. In winter when the cold of the night grew to the point of freezing the water in the pots inside the house, they went to the sty and fetched the weaklings among the piglets, taking them to their bed. Under the coarse blankets, the warmth from the humans saved the little animals from freezing and rescued them from certain death. Although the two were kindly people, it was not a compassionate soul that prompted them to act in that way: what concerned them, without sentimentalism or rhetoric, was to protect their daily bread, as is natural for people who, to maintain their life, have not learnt to think more than is needful. Many times I helped my grandfather Jerónimo in his swineherd’s labour, many times I dug the land in the vegetable garden adjoining the house, and I chopped wood for the fire, many times, turning and turning the big iron wheel which worked the water pump. I pumped water from the community well and carried it on my shoulders. Many times, in secret, dodging from the men guarding the cornfields, I went with my grandmother, also at dawn, armed with rakes, sacking and cord, to glean the stubble, the loose straw that would then serve as litter for the livestock. And sometimes, on hot summer nights, after supper, my grandfather would tell me: “José, tonight we’re going to sleep, both of us, under the fig tree”. There were two other fig trees, but that one, certainly because it was the biggest, because it was the oldest, and timeless, was, for everybody in the house, the fig tree. More or less by antonomasia, an erudite word that I met only many years after and learned the meaning of … Amongst the peace of the night, amongst the tree’s high branches a star appeared to me and then slowly hid behind a leaf while, turning my gaze in another direction I saw rising into view like a river flowing silent through the hollow sky, the opal clarity of the Milky Way, the Road to Santiago as we still used to call it in the village. With sleep delayed, night was peopled with the stories and the cases my grandfather told and told: legends, apparitions, terrors, unique episodes, old deaths, scuffles with sticks and stones, the words of our forefathers, an untiring rumour of memories that would keep me awake while at the same time gently lulling me. I could never know if he was silent when he realised that I had fallen asleep or if he kept on talking so as not to leave half-unanswered the question I invariably asked into the most delayed pauses he placed on purpose within the account: “And what happened next?” Maybe he repeated the stories for himself, so as not to forget them, or else to enrich them with new detail. At that age and as we all do at some time, needless to say, I imagined my grandfather Jerónimo was master of all the knowledge in the world. When at first light the singing of birds woke me up, he was not there any longer, had gone to the field with his animals, letting me sleep on. Then I would get up, fold the coarse blanket and barefoot – in the village I always walked barefoot till I was fourteen – and with straws still stuck in my hair, I went from the cultivated part of the yard to the other part, where the sties were, by the house. My grandmother, already afoot before my grandfather, set in front of me a big bowl of coffee with pieces of bread in and asked me if I had slept well. If I told her some bad dream, born of my grandfather’s stories, she always reassured me: “Don’t make much of it, in dreams there’s nothing solid”. At the time I thought, though my grandmother was also a very wise woman, she couldn’t rise to the heights grandfather could, a man who, lying under a fig tree, having at his side José his grandson, could set the universe in motion just with a couple of words. It was only many years after, when my grandfather had departed from this world and I was a grown man, I finally came to realise that my grandmother, after all, also believed in dreams. There could have been no other reason why, sitting one evening at the door of her cottage where she now lived alone, staring at the biggest and smallest stars overhead, she said these words: “The world is so beautiful and it is such a pity that I have to die”. She didn’t say she was afraid of dying, but that it was a pity to die, as if her hard life of unrelenting work was, in that almost final moment, receiving the grace of a supreme and last farewell, the consolation of beauty revealed. She was sitting at the door of a house like none other I can imagine in all the world, because in it lived people who could sleep with piglets as if they were their own children, people who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn’t see them again.

Many years later, writing for the first time about my grandfather Jerónimo and my grandmother Josefa (I haven’t said so far that she was, according to many who knew her when young, a woman of uncommon beauty), I was finally aware I was transforming the ordinary people they were into literary characters: this was, probably, my way of not forgetting them, drawing and redrawing their faces with the pencil that ever changes memory, colouring and illuminating the monotony of a dull and horizonless daily routine as if creating, over the unstable map of memory, the supernatural unreality of the country where one has decided to spend one’s life. The same attitude of mind that, after evoking the fascinating and enigmatic figure of a certain Berber grandfather, would lead me to describe more or less in these words an old photo (now almost eighty years old) showing my parents “both standing, beautiful and young, facing the photographer, showing in their faces an expression of solemn seriousness, maybe fright in front of the camera at the very instant when the lens is about to capture the image they will never have again, because the following day will be, implacably, another day … My mother is leaning her right elbow against a tall pillar and holds, in her right hand drawn in to her body, a flower. My father has his arm round my mother’s back, his callused hand showing over her shoulder, like a wing. They are standing, shy, on a carpet patterned with branches. The canvas forming the fake background of the picture shows diffuse and incongruous neo-classic architecture.” And I ended, “The day will come when I will tell these things. Nothing of this matters except to me. A Berber grandfather from North Africa, another grandfather a swineherd, a wonderfully beautiful grandmother; serious and handsome parents, a flower in a picture – what other genealogy would I care for? and what better tree would I lean against?”

I wrote these words almost thirty years ago, having no other purpose than to rebuild and register instants of the lives of those people who engendered and were closest to my being, thinking that nothing else would need explaining for people to know where I came from and what materials the person I am was made of, and what I have become little by little. But after all I was wrong, biology doesn’t determine everything and as for genetics, very mysterious must have been its paths to make its voyages so long … My genealogical tree (you will forgive the presumption of naming it this way, being so diminished in the substance of its sap) lacked not only some of those branches that time and life’s successive encounters cause to burst from the main stem but also someone to help its roots penetrate the deepest subterranean layers, someone who could verify the consistency and flavour of its fruit, someone to extend and strengthen its top to make of it a shelter for birds of passage and a support for nests. When painting my parents and grandparents with the paints of literature, transforming them from common people of flesh and blood into characters, newly and in different ways builders of my life, I was, without noticing, tracing the path by which the characters I would invent later on, the others, truly literary, would construct and bring to me the materials and the tools which, at last, for better or for worse, in the sufficient and in the insufficient, in profit and loss, in all that is scarce but also in what is too much, would make of me the person whom I nowadays recognise as myself: the creator of those characters but at the same time their own creation. In one sense it could even be said that, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page, book after book, I have been successively implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe that without them I wouldn’t be the person I am today; without them maybe my life wouldn’t have succeeded in becoming more than an inexact sketch, a promise that like so many others remained only a promise, the existence of someone who maybe might have been but in the end could not manage to be.

Now I can clearly see those who were my life-masters, those who most intensively taught me the hard work of living, those dozens of characters from my novels and plays that right now I see marching past before my eyes, those men and women of paper and ink, those people I believed I was guiding as I the narrator chose according to my whim, obedient to my will as an author, like articulated puppets whose actions could have no more effect on me than the burden and the tension of the strings I moved them with. Of those masters, the first was, undoubtedly, a mediocre portrait-painter, whom I called simply H, the main character of a story that I feel may reasonably be called a double initiation (his own, but also in a manner of speaking the author’s) entitled Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, who taught me the simple honesty of acknowledging and observing, without resentment or frustration, my own limitations: as I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world’s, if I can be allowed such an immoderate ambition. It’s not up to me, of course, to evaluate the merits of the results of efforts made, but today I consider it obvious that all my work from then on has obeyed that purpose and that principle.

Then came the men and women of Alentejo, that same brotherhood of the condemned of the earth where belonged my grandfather Jerónimo and my grandmother Josefa, primitive peasants obliged to hire out the strength of their arms for a wage and working conditions that deserved only to be called infamous, getting for less than nothing a life which the cultivated and civilised beings we are proud to be are pleased to call – depending on the occasion – precious, sacred or sublime. Common people I knew, deceived by a Church both accomplice and beneficiary of the power of the State and of the landlords, people permanently watched by the police, people so many times innocent victims of the arbitrariness of a false justice. Three generations of a peasant family, the Badweathers, from the beginning of the century to the April Revolution of 1974 which toppled dictatorship, move through this novel, called Risen from the Ground, and it was with such men and women risen from the ground, real people first, figures of fiction later, that I learned how to be patient, to trust and to confide in time, that same time that simultaneously builds and destroys us in order to build and once more to destroy us. The only thing I am not sure of having assimilated satisfactorily is something that the hardship of those experiences turned into virtues in those women and men: a naturally austere attitude towards life. Having in mind, however, that the lesson learned still after more than twenty years remains intact in my memory, that every day I feel its presence in my spirit like a persistent summons: I haven’t lost, not yet at least, the hope of meriting a little more the greatness of those examples of dignity proposed to me in the vast immensity of the plains of Alentejo. Time will tell.

What other lessons could I possibly receive from a Portuguese who lived in the sixteenth century, who composed the Rimas and the glories, the shipwrecks and the national disenchantments in the Lusíadas, who was an absolute poetical genius, the greatest in our literature, no matter how much sorrow this causes to Fernando Pessoa, who proclaimed himself its Super Camões? No lesson would fit me, no lesson could I learn, except the simplest, which could have been offered to me by Luís Vaz de Camões in his pure humanity, for instance the proud humility of an author who goes knocking at every door looking for someone willing to publish the book he has written, thereby suffering the scorn of the ignoramuses of blood and race, the disdainful indifference of a king and of his powerful entourage, the mockery with which the world has always received the visits of poets, visionaries and fools. At least once in life, every author has been, or will have to be, Luís de Camões, even if they haven’t written the poem Sôbolos Rios … Among nobles, courtiers and censors from the Holy Inquisition, among the loves of yester-year and the disillusionments of premature old age, between the pain of writing and the joy of having written, it was this ill man, returning poor from India where so many sailed just to get rich, it was this soldier blind in one eye, slashed in his soul, it was this seducer of no fortune who will never again flutter the hearts of the ladies in the royal court, whom I put on stage in a play called What shall I do with this Book?, whose ending repeats another question, the only truly important one, the one we will never know if it will ever have a sufficient answer: “What will you do with this book?” It was also proud humility to carry under his arm a masterpiece and to be unfairly rejected by the world. Proud humility also, and obstinate too – wanting to know what the purpose will be, tomorrow, of the books we are writing today, and immediately doubting whether they will last a long time (how long?) the reassuring reasons we are given or that are given us by ourselves. No-one is better deceived than when he allows others to deceive him.

Here comes a man whose left hand was taken in war and a woman who came to this world with the mysterious power of seeing what lies beyond people’s skin. His name is Baltazar Mateus and his nickname Seven-Suns; she is known as Blimunda and also, later, as Seven-Moons because it is written that where there is a sun there will have to be a moon and that only the conjoined and harmonious presence of the one and the other will, through love, make earth habitable. There also approaches a Jesuit priest called Bartolomeu who invented a machine capable of going up to the sky and flying with no other fuel than the human will, the will which, people say, can do anything, the will that could not, or did not know how to, or until today did not want to, be the sun and the moon of simple kindness or of even simpler respect. These three Portuguese fools from the eighteenth century, in a time and country where superstition and the fires of the Inquisition flourished, where vanity and the megalomania of a king raised a convent, a palace and a basilica which would amaze the outside world, if that world, in a very unlikely supposition, had eyes enough to see Portugal, eyes like Blimunda’s, eyes to see what was hidden … Here also comes a crowd of thousands and thousands of men with dirty and callused hands, exhausted bodies after having lifted year after year, stone-by-stone, the implacable convent walls, the huge palace rooms, the columns and pilasters, the airy belfries, the basilica dome suspended over empty space. The sounds we hear are from Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord, and he doesn’t quite know if he is supposed to be laughing or crying … This is the story of Baltazar and Blimunda, a book where the apprentice author, thanks to what had long ago been taught to him in his grandparents’ Jerónimo’s and Josefa’s time, managed to write some similar words not without poetry: “Besides women’s talk, dreams are what hold the world in its orbit. But it is also dreams that crown it with moons, that’s why the sky is the splendour in men’s heads, unless men’s heads are the one and only sky.” So be it.

Of poetry the teenager already knew some lessons, learnt in his textbooks when, in a technical school in Lisbon, he was being prepared for the trade he would have at the beginning of his labour’s life: mechanic. He also had good poetry masters during long evening hours in public libraries, reading at random, with finds from catalogues, with no guidance, no-one to advise him, with the creative amazement of the sailor who invents every place he discovers. But it was at the Industrial School Library that The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis started to be written … There, one day the young mechanic (he was about seventeen) found a magazine entitledAtena containing poems signed with that name and, naturally, being very poorly acquainted with the literary cartography of his country, he thought that there really was a Portuguese poet called Ricardo Reis. Very soon, though, he found that this poet was really one Fernando Nogueira Pessoa, who signed his works with the names of non-existent poets, born of his mind. He called them heteronyms, a word that did not exist in the dictionaries of the time which is why it was so hard for the apprentice to letters to know what it meant. He learnt many of Ricardo Reis’ poems by heart (“To be great, be one/Put yourself into the little things you do”); but in spite of being so young and ignorant, he could not accept that a superior mind could really have conceived, without remorse, the cruel line “Wise is he who is satisfied with the spectacle of the world”. Later, much later, the apprentice, already with grey hairs and a little wiser in his own wisdom, dared to write a novel to show this poet of the Odes something about the spectacle of the world of 1936, where he had placed him to live out his last few days: the occupation of the Rhineland by the Nazi army, Franco’s war against the Spanish Republic, the creation by Salazar of the Portuguese Fascist militias. It was his way of telling him: “Here is the spectacle of the world, my poet of serene bitterness and elegant scepticism. Enjoy, behold, since to be sitting is your wisdom …”

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis ended with the melancholy words: “Here, where the sea has ended and land awaits.” So there would be no more discoveries by Portugal, fated to one infinite wait for futures not even imaginable; only the usual fado, the same old saudade and little more … Then the apprentice imagined that there still might be a way of sending the ships back to the water, for instance, by moving the land and setting that out to sea. An immediate fruit of collective Portuguese resentment of the historical disdain of Europe (more accurate to say fruit of my own resentment …) the novel I then wrote - The Stone Raft - separated from the Continent the whole Iberian Peninsula and transformed it into a big floating island, moving of its own accord with no oars, no sails, no propellers, in a southerly direction, “a mass of stone and land, covered with cities, villages, rivers, woods, factories and bushes, arable land, with its people and animals” on its way to a new Utopia: the cultural meeting of the Peninsular peoples with the peoples from the other side of the Atlantic, thereby defying – my strategy went that far – the suffocating rule exercised over that region by the United States of America … A vision twice Utopian would see this political fiction as a much more generous and human metaphor: that Europe, all of it, should move South to help balance the world, as compensation for its former and its present colonial abuses. That is, Europe at last as an ethical reference. The characters in The Stone Raft - two women, three men and a dog – continually travel through the Peninsula as it furrows the ocean. The world is changing and they know they have to find in themselves the new persons they will become (not to mention the dog, he is not like other dogs …). This will suffice for them.

Then the apprentice recalled that at a remote time of his life he had worked as a proof-reader and that if, so to say, in The Stone Raft he had revised the future, now it might not be a bad thing to revise the past, inventing a novel to be called History of the Siege of Lisbon, where a proof-reader, checking a book with the same title but a real history book and tired of watching how “History” is less and less able to surprise, decides to substitute a “yes” for a “no”, subverting the authority of “historical truth”. Raimundo Silva, the proof-reader, is a simple, common man, distinguished from the crowd only by believing that all things have their visible sides and their invisible ones and that we will know nothing about them until we manage to see both. He talks about this with the historian thus: “I must remind you that proof-readers are serious people, much experienced in literature and life, My book, don’t forget, deals with history. However, since I have no intention of pointing out other contradictions, in my modest opinion, Sir, everything that is not literature is life, History as well, Especially history, without wishing to give offence, And painting and music, Music has resisted since birth, it comes and goes, tries to free itself from the word, I suppose out of envy, only to submit in the end, And painting, Well now, painting is nothing more than literature achieved with paintbrushes, I trust you haven’t forgotten that mankind began to paint long before it knew how to write, Are you familiar with the proverb, If you don’t have a dog, go hunting with a cat, in other words, the man who cannot write, paints or draws, as if he were a child, What you are trying to say, in other words, is that literature already existed before it was born, Yes, Sir, just like man who, in a manner of speaking, existed before he came into being, It strikes me that you have missed your vocation, you should have become a philosopher, or historian, you have the flair and temperament needed for these disciplines, I lack the necessary training, Sir, and what can a simple man achieve without training, I was more than fortunate to come into the world with my genes in order, but in a raw state as it were, and then no education beyond primary school, You could have presented yourself as being self-taught, the product of your own worthy efforts, there’s nothing to be ashamed of, society in the past took pride in its autodidacts, No longer, progress has come along and put an end to all of that, now the self-taught are frowned upon, only those who write entertaining verses and stories are entitled to be and go on being autodidacts, lucky for them, but as for me, I must confess that I never had any talent for literary creation, Become a philosopher, man, You have a keen sense of humour, Sir, with a distinct flair for irony, and I ask myself how you ever came to devote yourself to history, serious and profound science as it is, I’m only ironic in real life, It has always struck me that history is not real life, literature, yes, and nothing else, But history was real life at the time when it could not yet be called history, So you believe, Sir, that history is real life, Of course, I do, I meant to say that history was real life, No doubt at all, What would become of us if the deleatur did not exist, sighed the proof-reader.” It is useless to add that the apprentice had learnt, with Raimundo Silva, the lesson of doubt. It was about time.

Well, probably it was this learning of doubt that made him go through the writing of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. True, and he has said so, the title was the result of an optical illusion, but it is fair to ask whether it was the serene example of the proof-reader who, all the time, had been preparing the ground from where the new novel would gush out. This time it was not a matter of looking behind the pages of the New Testament searching for antitheses, but of illuminating their surfaces, like that of a painting, with a low light to heighten their relief, the traces of crossings, the shadows of depressions. That’s how the apprentice read, now surrounded by evangelical characters, as if for the first time, the description of the massacre of the innocents and, having read, he couldn’t understand. He couldn’t understand why there were already martyrs in a religion that would have to wait thirty years more to listen to its founder pronouncing the first word about it, he could not understand why the only person that could have done so dared not save the lives of the children of Bethlehem, he could not understand Joseph’s lack of a minimum feeling of responsibility, of remorse, of guilt, or even of curiosity, after returning with his family from Egypt. It cannot even be argued in defence that it was necessary for the children of Bethlehem to die to save the life of Jesus: simple common sense, that should preside over all things human and divine, is there to remind us that God would not send His Son to Earth, particularly with the mission of redeeming the sins of mankind, to die beheaded by a soldier of Herod at the age of two … In that Gospel, written by the apprentice with the great respect due to great drama, Joseph will be aware of his guilt, will accept remorse as a punishment for the sin he has committed and will be taken to die almost without resistance, as if this were the last remaining thing to do to clear his accounts with the world. The apprentice’s Gospel is not, consequently, one more edifying legend of blessed beings and gods, but the story of a few human beings subjected to a power they fight but cannot defeat. Jesus, who will inherit the dusty sandals with which his father had walked so many country roads, will also inherit his tragic feeling of responsibility and guilt that will never abandon him, not even when he raises his voice from the top of the cross: “Men, forgive him because he knows not what he has done”, referring certainly to the God who has sent him there, but perhaps also, if in that last agony he still remembers, his real father who has generated him humanly in flesh and blood. As you can see, the apprentice had already made a long voyage when in his heretical Gospel he wrote the last words of the temple dialogue between Jesus and the scribe: “Guilt is a wolf that eats its cub after having devoured its father, The wolf of which you speak has already devoured my father, Then it will be soon your turn, And what about you, have you ever been devoured, Not only devoured, but also spewed up”.

Had Emperor Charlemagne not established a monastery in North Germany, had that monastery not been the origin of the city of Münster, had Münster not wished to celebrate its twelve-hundredth anniversary with an opera about the dreadful sixteenth-century war between Protestant Anabaptists and Catholics, the apprentice would not have written his play In Nomine Dei. Once more, with no other help than the tiny light of his reason, the apprentice had to penetrate the obscure labyrinth of religious beliefs, the beliefs that so easily make human beings kill and be killed. And what he saw was, once again, the hideous mask of intolerance, an intolerance that in Münster became an insane paroxysm, an intolerance that insulted the very cause that both parties claimed to defend. Because it was not a question of war in the name of two inimical gods, but of war in the name of a same god. Blinded by their own beliefs, the Anabaptists and the Catholics of Münster were incapable of understanding the most evident of all proofs: on Judgement Day, when both parties come forward to receive the reward or the punishment they deserve for their actions on earth, God – if His decisions are ruled by anything like human logic – will have to accept them all in Paradise, for the simple reason that they all believe in it. The terrible slaughter in Münster taught the apprentice that religions, despite all they promised, have never been used to bring men together and that the most absurd of all wars is a holy war, considering that God cannot, even if he wanted to, declare war on himself …

Blind. The apprentice thought, “we are blind”, and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures. Then the apprentice, as if trying to exorcise the monsters generated by the blindness of reason, started writing the simplest of all stories: one person is looking for another, because he has realised that life has nothing more important to demand from a human being. The book is called All the Names. Unwritten, all our names are there. The names of the living and the names of the dead.

I conclude. The voice that read these pages wished to be the echo of the conjoined voices of my characters. I don’t have, as it were, more voice than the voices they had. Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.

Translated from the Portuguese: Tim Crosfield and Fernando Rodrigues

Blindness, Jose Saramago

Almost all of the caricatures of Jose Saramago emphasise his glasses-covered eyes and I now understand why. Having read Blindness, I feel as though I have really and truly been under Saramago’s microscope, dissected, disclosed, dislimbed and dissevered.

It’s an uncanny novel about blindness, sight and the very essence of human nature and society.

I must confess that when I picked up this novel I was not expecting to be transported into an alternate confronting (actually terrifying) universe. Saramago paints a very vivid picture of society’s descent into anarchy and reading it reminded me of America’s foray into McCarthyism in the 1950s.

Saramago’s story starts with a man in a car stopped at a red traffic light. The man suddenly loses his sight and unbeknownst to him, the light changes to green. The natural response of the drivers behind him is to protest by honking their horns which only makes the suddenly blind man more disorientated.

I was gripped from the outset:

“Some drivers have already got out of their cars, prepared to push the stranded vehicle to a spot where it will not hold up the traffic, they beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head in their direction, first to one side then to the other, he is clearly shouting something, to judge by the movements of his mouth he appears to be repeating some words, no one word but three, as turns out to be the case when someone finally manages to open the door, I am blind.”

The story unfolds from this point with readers wondering about this strange malady which has infected this man without apparent reason. The blindness is both physical, as it spreads pandemically through the nation, and metaphorical, signalling society’s growing inability to appreciate the nuances of the individual and the descent into egocentricism and selfishness. Indeed, none of these characters have names – they are simply identified by their dominant characteristic (physical or otherwise). There is the ‘first blind man’, the ‘doctor’, the ‘doctor’s wife’ and the ‘girl with the dark glasses’.

I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see

The cry of “I am blind” leaps from one character to the next, transferred through the ironic ‘glance’ of the blind person. It is a terrifying concept this idea that blindness could be contagious – terrifying for the reader and clearly for the imagined government of Saramago’s book. The national response is to quarantine said blind people and anyone who might be contagious. What happens in this novel after the point of quarantine is unbelievable, but not, for it has happened repeatedly throughout world history. I will say no more, for any further disclosure will simply destroy the pleasure involved in uncovering Saramago’s brilliance in constructing this world. As was said about him in 1998, when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he is a writer  “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality”.

This is not a comforting  book. I say this despite the fact that some of the characters in this book are indeed stellar… I think particularly of the doctor’s wife who feigns blindness in order to remain by her husband’s side. What struck me about this book was man’s general ability to forget about the needs of others, to focus only on himself, to push the dying man out of the way and trample him viciously in the process. I was shaken by this and found that the moments of greatness exhibited by some of these characters did not overshadow the overwhelming sense that in Saramago’s world people simply don’t care. Like John Self, I think that this book “shows how fragile our civilisation is, and how always close society is to collapse.”

The New York Times’ Eulogy and review of Blindness.

The Pearl, John Steinbeck

How is it possible that I have only just read this book?

The Power of Half, Kevin Salwen and Hannah Salwen

I think I can safely say that this is a life changing kind of book. The kind that really sticks in your brain and makes you think and then think again and then reconsider every aspect of your little life and try to realign your actions and reactions with the new sense of reality that you suddenly have.

This book is not a literary masterpiece. It cannot compare with Dickens or Woolf or Twain or Steinbeck. What it is, is an inspirational revelation, a glimpse into the true power of one, the intense possibility that one individual can indeed change the world.

I loved the structure of this book. Kevin, the father, is the main author. The book is narrated from his perspective and is filled with his insights into the world and indeed into his family and their journey. He is an ex-journalist and the story is beautifully told and littered with quotes from the inspirational masters. Kevin’s role in this story is really as a back-seat driver, or an observer. The adventures are in fact triggered and driven by Kevin’s daughter, Hannah, and she is the co-author of this book. In fact, many of the chapters feature Hannah’s experiences or insights as a separate section, clearly aimed at the younger readers or for parents to gain some insights into what their children might be thinking or what might trigger their interest. The fact that the book is narrated from these two different perspectives add to the depth of the reading experience and makes it a wonderful, rounded insight into this family’s experiences throughout this journey.

The essence of the is story is found in Kevin’s realisation that their lives are governed by the ‘New Normal’.

“Joan and I simply called it ‘the treadmill’. We created a lifestyle; then, just to keep up, we had to stay in motion. And like the automated treadmill, it had a builtin mechanism to keep it going. We’d never dreamed of going from power windows back to hand-cranked ones or leather seats to cloth. In fact, I couldn’t remember any time we had done that in any facet of our lives – cars, houses, electronics, or musical instruments. Better, nicer, more became the New Normal.”

It is something that most of us can relate to – the underlying pressure to keep up with the Joneses, those neighbours of our own imagining. For the Salwen Family it is the struggle to get out of this trap that distinguishes them from other families. And, the essence of the success of their endeavours is that they decide not to be immobilised by the enormity and vastness of the problems facing the world and by their inability to make a huge difference to a large number of people. Rather, they are empowered by the fact that everything that they do for others helps. They follow the philosophy of Edmund Burke: ’Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.’ As Salwen narrates in this book:

“There are 6 Billions people in this world, and you are one person. It’s easy to think, ‘How much of a difference can I really make?’ The short answer is, a lot. I love the quote from Marian Wright Edelman, the children’s rights advocate: ‘We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.’”

The way that this family goes about making change is by empowering their children – “If you want children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.” In fact, they make their children equal partners in all the decisions that they make from selling their house and giving away half of its value to where and who they give the money to and how it is used. The key to their success is the involvement of the whole family.

The family’s philosophy is summarised by a quote from Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., explaining how he wanted to be remembered:

“‘Every now and then I think about my own death, and I think about my own funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize. Tell them not to mention that i have three or four hundred other awards. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody … Say that I was a drum major for justice … for peace … for righteousness … I just want to leave a committed life behind.’”

The value of the journey that the Salwen family experience cannot be quantified. It is, indeed, priceless:

“To put it in a literary context, we had come of age. We had coalesced as a family, brought together by a mission that really mattere. Maybe it was a bit premature to claim victory, but sitting there at the dinner table in Accra, Ghana, I believed we had found our family legend. We knew what we wanted to stand for.”

To learn more about this incredibly inspiring family, visit their website.

The Angel’s Game, Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind was possibly one of the best books that I have ever read. I think that it was the concept of the Cemetery of Books which got me … an awesome notion for someone who loves the smell and sense of miles of books. In my mind it is one of the ephemeral books which lingers for a long time after the last page is done and dusted, as though it occupies the very air that we breathe. I remember distinctly being drawn into the Cemetery of Books and wanting to stay there myself, wanting to know exactly the flavour of such a place, how it resonated within one’s spirit and captured one’s imagination so wholly. I was transfixed by the books. 

So, it was with quick excitement that I bought The Angel’s Game, quite some time ago I must confess and it has been sitting patiently on that long shelf of TBR books that occupies half my house. In part I was afraid to read this book because I didn’t want to destroy my previous conception of Zafon’s genius. I was loathe to be disappointed. I know that I have reviewed another book by Zafon but that was YA fiction and occupies a different space for me so there was little chance of being disappointed there – and indeed, I wasn’t in that example.

Thus it was that I stumbled across The Angel’s Game while moving house and decided that it was time to bite the proverbial bullet and read the book and just surrender myself to the possibility of disappointment.

One of the things that I think classifies this author as a master is his ability to create an entire world that teeters on fantasy. It is hard to tell what is real in Zafon’s writing and what is lost in the mist of his imagination. There is no doubt that The Angel’s Game meets this expectation for there are several cloudy worlds mingling in this tome. I loved the versions of reality that Zafon created here and I found each of them intriguing for different reasons… I also enjoyed the different narrative strands and the way that they hung with possibility sometimes realised and sometimes not.

On one level this book grabbed me at the outset:

“A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood, and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him.”

It seems that this is Zafon’s primary interest, the power of words, of their imprint on paper and how that paper lingers – the Cemetery of Books, it finds its home here too. “A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.” I was intrigued by this character that lead the book’s opening. He was nicely rounded and seemed to leap from the pages, his passion and pain so entirely captivating that I found myself drawn into his world. The first part of the novel continued in this fashion – ACT ONE: City of the Damned.

As we travel through David Martin’s world we meet a host of other characters, the bookseller and his son, the writer, the illusive editor Andreas Corelli and the essential love interest, Cristina. Some of these characters are more beautifully developed than others and perhaps this is par for the course in a novel which covers so many different genres – history, fantasy, epic love story, mystery, thriller … Unfortunately, at some point I was lost by the intermingling of these different elements and I found myself struggling to read the second part of this book. I can’t seem to pinpoint exactly what element led me astray … at times I didn’t really care about Martin and his miseries and I think that in order for one to fall for a book one has to feel some sort of commitment to the protagonist, or to another character. I wanted Martin to have more spine, to be substantial perhaps. When he finally did show himself to be somewhat heroic it was too late and thus I didn’t cry for him when his loved one disappeared under the ice … I think at that moment I was simply too confused by the way that the novel’s structure seemed to disintegrate or maybe vanish.

I still enjoyed the book and I was very taken with its ending, confronting as it was. Not quite The Shadow of the Wind … but not too disappointing either!

A Thousand Sisters: My Journey into The Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman

Off the bat I have to state that Lisa Shannon has accomplished something very heroic in her life and she should be commended for her strength of spirit and her courage in standing up for a cause in which she believed and for trying to be the voice for so many who remain unheard.

This is a difficult book to discuss. On one hand it raises the awareness of the plight of women in the Congo and indeed of the overall horror of the situation there for those who suffer it daily. In this vein it is a good book because it sets out to inform and I think that it does so quite competently. I loved the fact that Shannon interspersed her photographs with the various threads of narrative. This made it all very real and added an artistic quality to a text that would (for many reasons) have been quite difficult to read. I was also very moved by the memorial wall which the author has included at the end of the book and in some ways, I think this is perhaps the very strength of Shannon’s vision and the power of her commitment to these women and their stories.

Where I found this book challenging was that at times I couldn’t help but feel that Shannon was talking for these women, instead of allowing them to speak for themselves. I am not sure how she could have done things in any other way, but I there were many moments where I found myself uncomfortable in her white, western, privileged shoes as she tried to coax various stories out of the many women she interviewed. The way she was steering them into a particular narrative or point of view in order to fit with what she felt people in America needed to hear left me feeling empty and greatly dis-eased by the presumptions that are inherent in this type of positioning.

In a strange way it reminds me of my response to the book I, Safiya – a brilliant autobiography written by someone who does not have a voice for writing. The substance was so awe-inspiring, yet the narrative just let me down. And I felt disgusted with my judgemental self for not loving I, Safiya because it was so clearly an inspiration that this woman managed to tell her story and who was I to say that her voice didn’t meet my expectations? Yet I did. (Shrink, cringe). I passed my White, Western, educated, English hand over I, Safiya in dismay and I find myself quivering to do the same with this book (although for slightly different reasons).

Woe are the women of Congo – I can’t begin to imagine the pain and sorrow of any peoples who have to endure the type of suffering that A Thousand Sisters describes. But, how heroic that these women go on! How incredible that they dress in bright colours and dance and rejoice, that they choose life in the midst of this hardship and horror! I can’t help but feel that Shannon failed to grasp this miracle, and that she was disappointed that the women she encountered were not more tortured so that they could better meet with her expectations or perhaps soothe her troubled soul which was reeling from her own sorrows.

I have no doubt that Shannon’s intentions in writing this book were only pure and that it is my own inadequacies and post-colonial conscience speaking tongues of judgement here. I definitely recommend reading this book if only to learn more about what has occurred in the Congo. I followed many of the links that Shannon provided and found the information there heart-wrenching. I am certainly better educated about the Congo and will look out for more books about the plgi

A Tiger in Eden, Chris Flynn

This book came courtesy of the good folk at textpublishing and I have to say that off the bat it wasn’t something that would normally attract my reading attention. On the surface, this book traces the journey of an Irish man wanted for ‘things’ he did back in Ireland. To survive, he has travelled to Thailand where he is living an idyllic but tortured existence romping from beach to beach and woman to woman.

But that is just one element of this story, and a sometimes superfluous one at that.

What this book is really about is a man’s struggle to negotiate the minefield of his past, to learn to accept responsibility for actions that he chose to take and then to be able to move forward and actually know and like himself in his truest form. For me, it was this that was at the core of this novel.

I am still unsure whether or not Flynn has actually managed to pull off this challenging weave of Irish rebel replete with ‘No Surrender’ tattoo and soul-searching individual perched in the strange embrace of a monk’s meditation retreat. I agree with what Rob Minshall at the ABC Weekend Bookworm has noted:

… if anything, and considering his supposedly violent past and bigoted beliefs, Billy’s character is a little too sensitive. An Australian girl composing songs on the beach moves him to tears at one stage of the novel, he falls in love awfully quickly, he enjoys a good book and, considering his years as a sectarian street fighter, he’s terribly perceptive about cultural differences.

I do think that the ending came together too easily and that has let the book down a bit. I wanted more than just a sweet happy sunset. It didn’t seem to do the subtext of this novel justice.

What I do know is that I read this book and enjoyed it, it made me think about people I would not have otherwise thought about, in a way that I definitely would never have considered appropriate for their stereotype. I warmed to this different approach and in this way, the book was, for me, successful.

“You think I don’t know what the world’s like sure I seen more than most men could stand and I done things I’m not proud of … I done enough bad shit in my life and I need to get myself sorted out before it’s too late, maybe it is already maybe I’m just kidding myself on but I got nothing left no more enthusiasm for nothing I’ve just got to stop and face up to the world before it crushes me like the f*cking worthless bug that I am.”

I couldn’t help but like Billy and I liked him even more when I read this interview with Flynn which I think adds enormously to the book.

This is definitely worth a read and I will be watching out for more from this debut author.

Holy Woman, Sara Yocheved Rigler

Wow, what a read, what a book, what a woman. Boy do I feel small and worthless in comparison!!

A couple of things that this book has taught me:

1. Sara Yocheved Rigler is a very insightful woman and is definitely someone I will watch out for in the future. I have already ordered several of her other publications and have taken the time to listen to some of her talks on line (torahanytime.com) and to read some of her contribution to the AISH.com website. She has amazing insight and in my short exposure to her writing I feel as though I have learned a great many things.

2. Rebbetzin Kramer was one hell of a woman. Seriously. I don’t think I can imagine someone being so humble and giving and generous, living without so much and feeling so blessed all at the same time. It’s beyond me. On one level reading about this incredible woman (holocaust survivor, barren, poor) made me feel quite selfish and uncaring. I definitely don’t give enough – of myself, of my money, my time. Who does? From Rigler’s perspective, Rebbetzin Kramer did!

But, at the same time I learned that every small thing that you do to help someone else is priceless. Rebbetzin Kramer lived her life so wholly to make other people grow and feel worthy that she shone, despite her poverty and the various sorrows that her life brought to her. She did it with grace and faith, with commitment and love. No act of charity or kindness was beyond her or too trivial and she prided herself in knowing that she made even a slight difference in the lives of the people that she helped.

I am never going to be a Rebbetzin Kramer, not even close. I don’t see myself fostering a troop of mentally challenged children who need full time care. I don’t see myself going without even the most basic amenities (like electricity and running water) in order to provide for someone else. I can’t imagine that I would be satisfied with my husband travelling for months at a time to raise thousands of dollars to help those less fortunate (who could possibly be less fortunate?).

But, what I can do, is realise the value of perspective. Rebbetzin Kramer didn’t see herself as lacking or going without. She saw herself as blessed because she could help so many people in so many different ways. It is this that we should all strive to emulate – the ability to appreciate that even the most simply of things can transform another’s life.

So, take the time to smile at a stranger, to stop and wonder at all that we have even though there might be so much more that we want. This is the lesson that Rebbetzin Kramer brings us.

One Day, David Nicholls

I’m not sure what I was expecting with this book. I had  read several reviews which made it sound like The Notebook (something light and fluffy to be consumed on a whim). So, it languished in my virtual library for quite some time before I could be bothered to start reading it – and, I must confess, I was looking for something light and fluffy and perhaps whimsical.

Imagine my surprise when I was gripped from the first page – “gently hooked” as one reviewer has described it! And, like The Captive Reader, I too was devastated to have to put this book down, even just for a moment. I couldn’t bear the thought that something might happen without me (ridiculous, I know, it is a book after all … everything has already happened!). But, Em and Dex, Dex and Em, they were my friends in a way, and I was honoured that they chose to share themselves with me in this magnificent way.

I loved the way Nicholls constructed this narrative, the way he switched between Emma and Dexter with such fluid swiftness that at times I didn’t realise that the switch had actually occurred and that fit with the premise, that Em and Dex were connected on some subliminal level. Two pieces in a puzzle. I loved the way they yearned for each other without realising what it was that was missing until it was too late. And indeed, at times this novel is about ‘too late’ and the repercussions of not acting on one’s instincts and of doubting and questioning.

I was taken by the contradictions between these characters and they way that they were Yin and Yang so much of the time. This friendship was so real to me that it hurt – whether or not this is what Nicholls was trying to achieve I cannot know, but I expect that most readers will see a part of themselves in this story and that it will make them ache.

I was so impressed with Nicholls’ clear talent for writing that I immediately consulted Google and found one of his short stories -

Every Good Boy: A wonderful tale about a boy and his affair with a piano which has devastating consequences.

I will definitely be looking out for this author!!

11/22/63, Stephen King

As a young reader I ploughed through all of Stephen King’s work. I can’t quite recall what grabbed me at the time … Most probably it was just that his work was just so readable and gripping. It has been a long time since I read any of King’s work and I have to confess that I only picked this one up because of a high school history project that I once did on JFK. I couldn’t resist seeing what King had done with this era and how he had resolved some of the controversies surrounding Kennedy’s assassination.

In hindsight, this book had some interesting elements. I was intrigued by King’s description of time travel and the implications of changing the past. At times I felt that this part of the book was too drawn out and at times meaningless. But I did find myself considering his notion of the “butterfly effect” and the waves of change that ripple from any one moment in time …

It was clear that King had done considerable research in constructing this narrative – reconstructing the events around Kennedy’s last moments and building Lee Harvey Oswald’s persona seductively in the background. I found all of this very well crafted. The insights that King provided were intriguing and certainly provided much food for thought. Who was Oswald? Was he a patsy? King’s time travel enables him to envisage multiple endings or resolutions to this situation and I found that quite liberating in some way.

As to be expected, King’s characters were wonderful and layered and there was sufficient thrill in each of them to provide action to sustain the flow of the book and to carry King’s underlying interest in the Kennedy story.

Despite all these intriguing elements, I found reading this book somewhat slow and at times tedious. While I appreciate King’s desire to properly explore his context, there were times when I felt that he had done so in a manner that was too long winded and that detracted from the flow and speed of his narrative. I don’t think I would recommend this book to anyone … If you have an interest in Kennedy then it is a must read, or, if you are a history buff and appreciate some of the deeper nuances of the passing of time and the impact of all events on the evolution of society and the world, then I expect you will find this book well worth the time.