V V: Jose Saramago's last notes

Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago once said, “If I had died when I was 60, I would have written nothing.” While this glosses over his major successes in fiction, with A Novel of Painting and Calligraphy (1977) and a number of books of poetry, plays and essays, there was little in Saramago’s background till the late seventies to suggest a flowering of success at an age when many are ready to pack up. Novels followed in quick succession, including bestsellers, All the Names, Blindness, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The Cave and others that have been translated into 40 languages and established him as one of the world’s most influential writers. In the last years of his life – he died in 2010 – he wrote a blog on all the happenings in the world. They have been put together in The Notebook, with a foreword by Umberto Eco (Verso paperback, £8.99). It contains themes on just about everything — politics, economics, philosophy and so on.

 

Saramago was a Marxist of the old school and his uncompromised and uncompromising communism was partly responsible for him getting fired from a number of jobs under the fascist Antonio Salazar’s regime (1889-1970). With all avenues of employment closed, Saramago stuck to what came closest to him: books and journalism. “Being fired was the best luck in my life,” he said. “It made me stop and reflect.”

The Notebook is a memoir of “an unreconstructed communist” (as the Vatican described him, opposing the Nobel prize ) as well as his political philosophy on “the problem of evil and the ecological and social imbalances wrought by human greed,” to ask, “whether a world in which 300 of the richest people own as much as the poorest 40 per cent combined a great achievement.”

The themes in the blog (there are over 300 entries) are broken up month-wise, beginning with September 2008 till November 2009. Each topic is covered in a page or two with no particular order: you can dip into it at any point, go back and forth as you like. It begins with the US presidential election — “George W Bush or the Age of Lies”.

“This man with his mediocre intelligence, abysmal ignorance, confused communication skills, and constant succumbing to the irresistible temptation of pure nonsense has presented himself to humanity in the grotesque pose of a cowboy who has inherited the world and mistaken it for a handful of cattle. We don’t know what he really thinks, and we didn’t even know if he does think (in the noble sense of the word) and we don’t know whether he might not be just a badly programmed robot that constantly confuses and switches around the messages it carries around inside it. But to give the man some credit for once in his life, there is one program in the robot George Bush … that works to perfection: lying.”

Saramago doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to political bigwigs strutting around the world stage. In “Berlusconi and Co”, he asks “in the land of the Mafia and Camorra, what importance could the proven fact that the prime minister is a criminal possibly have? In a land where justice never had much of a reputation, who cares if the prime minister gets approval for laws aimed at defending his own interests and protecting himself against any attempt to punish his excesses and abuses of authority?”

In “The Irresponsible Sarkozy”, he writes, “I never thought much of this gentleman … and I think that from today I will start to think even less of him, if that’s possible… In a move of remarkable political hypocrisy, Sarkozy is accusing Hamas of acting irresponsibly by launching rockets into Israeli territory. [But] Sarkozy should also denounce the Israeli army and air force, on an unimaginable scale, on the civilian population of the Gaza strip.”

“What might God think of Ratzinger? What might God think of the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church of which this Ratzinger is a sovereign pope? As far as I know no one has ever dared to formulate these heretical questions, perhaps knowing in advance that they are not nor will there ever be answers to them… As I once wrote … God is the silence of the universe and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.”

Saramago’s themes have always been philosophical and millennial, and the blog entries show him on the widest possible canvas. But the best ones are reserved for his fellow writers and twentieth-century capitalism.

“I should ask the political economists, the moralists, if they have already calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to wretchedness, to overwork, to demoralisation, to infantilisation, to despicable ignorance, to insurmountable misfortune, to utter penury, in order to produce one rich person.”

Prima facie, the book may give the impression that it is one of those heavy tomes of the mind. It isn’t because you can take each blog entry in itself and set your own place in reading them. Each entry will not leave you untouched.