The Novels of José Saramago: Echoes from the Past, Pathways into the Future (review)

David G. Frier has been for the past two decades one of the most cogent, intelligent, lucid and foremost critics José Saramago’s works. Even before the writer had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1998, Frier had already established himself as one of the author’s most influential scholars with a good number of critically well-received essays exploring the many issues that have shaped the trajectory of Saramago’s work, especially his novels. He has continued to play a major role in the writer’s post-Nobel phase with other provocative and incisive essays dealing with the tensions, the complexities, and the diversity of themes present in the author’s work. With a cross-disciplinary approach to the many novels written by Saramago, Frier has provided the writer’s readers with crucial reflections and insights regarding the myriad of circuits of connections across the novels and other texts and disciplines, as well as the underlying conceptual framework of a work of art that is often rooted in a specific and identifiable social, cultural and historical context, a framework that takes primacy in the novels published prior to O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo. Frier’s book, The Novels of José Saramago: Echoes from the Past, Pathways into the Future, the first major critical work on the Portuguese author written in English adds significantly to the stature that he already enjoyed among Saramago’s scholars. The scope and the breath of the volume are impressive and it definitely makes an important contribution to the understanding and the reevaluation of writer’s novelistic production. The book evinces solid and thorough research on the different issues that preoccupied Saramago both as an artist and an individual who always sided with those who had been silenced by History and never had any access to power. Moreover, the book abounds in innovative insights and it meticulously maps the conflicts, the perspectives, the social and historical referents, the imaginary, and the multitude of questions about literature, history, fiction, truth, objectivity, textuality, continuity and rupture, and the construction of reality that inform all the writer’s works whether they are the more historically-bounded fictions of the 80’s or his later more allegorical novels. It is the most comprehensible and detailed monograph on Saramago in the English language ranging through history, literature, philosophy, politics (fascism and Marxism), culture, religion, and gender, colonial, identity and class issues, a must read book for serious scholars of the Portuguese writer’s work.

The book is divided into an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion, all of which are also subdivided into a number of sections. The two chapters and the conclusion focus on different novels written by Saramago while the introduction contextualizes the literary, political, and historical coordinates of his works and examines the ideological and social conditions that ground both the writer’s life and his literary production. In addition, the introduction deals with Saramago’s mode of expression, his use of multiple rhetorical devices and flourishes in his works, his digressive style, and also his outspoken views regarding a myriad of issues that grip and negatively impact humankind. The focal point of the first chapter, which is entitled “Privilege and Exclusion,” is Levantado do chão and Memorial do convento, possibly the two most ideologically committed novels of the writer’s corpus, as Frier claims. Of all of Saramago’s novels, these two texts much more than others are focused on issues of class, privilege and exclusion, immense wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness, repression, and the use and abuse of rhetoric for political objectives and the writing of an official historical discourse that just gives voice to the powerful. Indeed, these are some of the issues that Frier deals with in the first chapter. He makes a powerful and, I believe, well-justified case to classify both works as Marxist in orientation, given that both fit...