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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?
Thanks to the wonderful resident gringos of Sucre, and to their personal libraries, I’ve somehow managed – in a city where the bookstores only sell stationery and in which the only people who read in the plazas or the cafes or on buses are foreigners – to keep myself entrenched in the realm of the highbrow and the literary. I’ve even been able to choose the direction my readings have taken, which is how I have returned to the world of Jose Saramago.
Please note, I’m about to completely spoil the plot for anyone who hasn’t read this book.
All the Names bears a number of similarities to The Double, which I’ve already blogged about. Both narratives see a very bored and single man becoming fixated on the search for another person whom he has never met. Both men delve into phone books and other types of catalogues, though in The Double the catalogue is a video store, while in All the Names it is – among other places – a cemetery.
All the Namesis a meditation on death and memory. At the centre of the novel is the question of what we do with the dead, and of where we go when we die. Saramago’s approach is humanist, though; there is no suggestion of afterlives here. At the most basic level, when we die we go to the cemetery and become a grave, and we go into the Central Registry and become a death certificate.
The protagonist, Senhor Jose, works in the Central Registry, where the all the names of the living are separated from those of the dead by an archaic filing system. Every life and every name is, in the Central Registry, reduced to dates of birth, marriage, divorce and death, and to the names of spouses and direct family. It is a reductive way of remembering the dead. It is also a way of forgetting them, of shelving them away in the dust and gloom of the registry.
Senhor Jose spends almost the entire novel searching for a woman he will never meet. In doing so he is trying to give detail to her life, to make it more than just the recorded dates of birth, death, etc. This is no easy task; the woman disappears and leaves few clues about her life or death. Before he reaches the end of his quest Senhor Jose knows he is approaching an impassable wall, a cul-de-sac which is the obscurity death casts over life.
A building sense of melancholy hangs over the narrative; Saramago is not seeking to cheat the simple, hard facts of death and of the cemetery and the registry. As a result the book is poignantly, hauntingly sad at times, and leaves an unnerving sense of loss which brought itching tears to my eyes. This is as much because of the loneliness that Senhor Jose never escapes as because of his musings on death.
Still, with Senhor Jose’s quest, Saramago depicts some of the small, dedicated efforts we make to ensure that we keep the dead in more than just the catalogues of cemetery and registry. A concern of the book is the keeping or intrusion of the dead among the living. The walls of the registry and cemetery are continually knocked down and expanded to make room for and contain all of the dead. Eventually the cemetery grows too big for walls, and the graves of the dead begin to overlap with the land of living.
The final act of Senhor Jose, aided by the authoritarian Registrar who provides a wonderful sub-plot, is to de-register the death of the woman, to destroy any recorded signs of her death, to place her file back amongst the living. It is a gesture that changes nothing, but which is about as much as can be done to give dignity to the dead, to ensure they never become just file and headstone. Even human memory is fickle, Saramago notes; there is much about a person that is irretrievably lost when they die; the the cul-de-sac that we, like Senhor Jose, arrive at in our remembering.
This is a sad book for one as vivacious as Saramago. He does nothing to try to evade or deny the cold inevitability of death, but his idea that the names of the dead belong alongside the names of the living, and not off in the dark repositories where lives are diminished and then forgotten has a sweet note to it. Life and death are, after all, close companions that one way or another belong side by side.
It was a not inappropriate coincidence that found me, in the same week that i began reading Jose Saramago’s The Double, watching the film adaptation of Saramago’s Blindness.
I read Blindness about a year ago, and at the time found it somewhat annoying. Saramago’s endless intrusions and digressions got in the way of a perfectly adequate science fictiony story in which a city is blighted by an epidemic of inexplicable blindness. The story was so simple that it almost felt like something was missing.
The Double is guilty of all the same shortcomings i found in Blindness, but i found this book utterly engaging and absorbing. Saramago’s fictions revolve around one slight jump out of normality, and all the implications that come from this. In the case of The Double, a history teacher watches a film and discovers that one of the actors in it is his exact double, in every way.
It is the simplest of plots, but Saramago invests enough psychological terror and uncertainty in his plot to make it quite compelling. The same was very much true of Blindness, i realise now in hindsight.
With such a taut and simple narrative thread, a little relief is needed, and this is exactly what Saramago’s dithering digressions provide. Though they bear only the most tangental relevance to the story around them, they allow him to reflect on the fears and failings of his characters without allowing his stories to become painfully grim.
Although i enjoyed the film Blindness – it is a remarkably close adaptation of the book such as i remember it – what it most lacked was Saramago’s voice. He had been very reluctant to have the book made into a film, and perhaps with good reason. The film dispenses with his wandering intrusions, and in doing so becomes almost completely humourless, and far far bleaker than the novel.
It also probably goes without saying that there is something paradoxical about trying to make a film of Blindness. The book is all black words on a white page, and so of course leaves the reader blind and forced to imagine the unfolding events. The film shows its audience everything; the characters are blind but the cameras can never be.
The Double would be far better suited to adaptation; the terror within the book is precisely a visual, tactile one, with the identical characters interchanging and competing with each other in a seemingly pointless but completely inescapable feud to be the one and only.
After reading (and watching) Blindness i wondered what point Saramago had been trying to make. After The Double i think that is probably the wrong question. Saramago explores the mundane normality of society, but with a single, simple twist adds something new and uncanny, that turns the world upside down. He shows us how people respond and how they survive. There doesn’t need to be an exact point to this, it is enough that, in getting into the heads of his characters, he gets into the heads of everyone.
