Every time I leave home and go a-travelling I am risking a great deal. I am throwing myself upon the mercy of the road, and staking everything on the kindness of strangers, and on the uncertain principal that at all times and in all places I will be able to find something suitably high-brow to read.

Somehow through every trip my luck has held, and I’ve still never had to read anything by Dan Brown. There has always been someone offering to lend a tome, or there has been a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore. In one instance there were the immense vaults of a British Council library.

On every trip or journey natural literary tendencies emerge. From out of that British Council library in Madrid emerged novels I’d never heard of by Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene. Crossing the USofA I couldn’t escape the Kerouac and the beats; I’m still not sure whether or not I want to escape them.

The theme of my time in Bolivia emerged in Coroico. Floundering and forgotten on the bottom shelf of a hotel book exchange was Jose Saramago’s The Stone Raft.

This could only be destiny. In Madrid the treasures of the British Council had enthralled me, but they had all been very… British. A rather important someone had expounded to me the wonders of Jose Saramago, but I had been unable to find him in English. The Stone Raft was the first of Saramago’s books to be recommended to me, and ever since it had been wedged prominently within my consciousness, demanding attention. So, that forgotten book on that forgotten shelf became mine, and I had my literary theme for the trip, and yet another blog topic (care to read the first and second Saramago blogs?).

 

Whenever I read Saramago I am reminded of Madrid. He is Portuguese, not Spanish, but the same sense of humour and playfulness that I found in Spain is scrawled onto every page penned by Saramago. There are traces of the same all across Bolivia. It must be a Latin thing.

The Stone Raft could be called a celebration of Iberian-ness. It begins with the tearing apart of the Pyrenees, separating Spain and Portugal from continental Europe (Andorra sides with Europe) as the peninsula-turned-island floats off into the Atlantic. While some in Europe are glad to see Iberia cast adrift, others are filled with a longing to follow, and all over the continent graffiti appears declaring Nous aussi, nous sommes ibériques; Auch wir sind iberisch; Nos quoque iberi sumus; We are Iberians too.

Successive waves of panic and awe wash over the population of the once-peninsula. Gibraltar recedes away behind them, still anchored at the mouth of the Mediterranean. The Azores approach and it looks as though a collision is imminent. Within the severed peninsula, the population first surges towards the coast, to occupy the hotels left hollow by the exodus of the wealthy and the tourists, and then sweeps back inland to avoid the impending islands.

There is brutality as the authorities seek to maintain a sense of law and order; there is farce as the governments bicker and posture and concur; there is caricature as the North Americans ponder the possible strategic value of Iberia as an annex of Newfoundland. Out of all this emerges another narrative, as a group of strangers who have experienced personal miracles and anomalies to parallel the rending of the Pyrenees band together and take to the roads of Iberia.

Their journey takes them through the remote parts of Iberia, the barren, archaeological deserts of Andalucia, the Portuguese coastline, the mountains and wild coast of Galicia, the lonely Pyrenees and the terrifying drop into oblivion where once there had been only stone and border crossings. They do not visit Madrid or Barcelona, they flit by Sevilla and Porto, keeping largely to the villages, country roads and farmhouses. As they travel Saramago wanders and digresses, detailing the myths, histories and curiosities of the peninsula. He celebrates Iberia, its majesty and foibles.

As with Saramago’s other novels, he seems to skim over the surface of his own narratives, leaving much unsaid and unexplored. The tensions and ecstasies of the travellers are never explicated in full, but they are there between the lines, unspoken between the characters. There are no resolutions, and when the novel ends the peninsula is still inexplicably adrift in the ocean, though whether it will continue its voyage or not is unclear.

Once again I found myself pondering the why of a Saramago novel. The idea of the departure of Iberia is wonderful, and Saramago obviously enjoys dancing over the established political shape of Europe, but is there some deeper, obscure point here? I don’t think so, and more and more I like Saramago’s representations of life without conclusions and clever climaxes. There is nothing here but the reality and unreality of life.

My favourite image from the book is of a Europe daubed in graffiti, expressing both wanderlust and old existential angst. We are Iberians too, adrift on a mysterious raft in a cruel sea. Or we are Iberians too, yearning to be forcibly severed from the mainland, to have adventure thrust upon us. Or we are Iberians too, let us explore the lands we call home, and see them from a new perspective, and rediscover their hidden quirks and sublimities. What deeper point need a novel make?