In September 2008, at the age of eighty-five, José Saramago was feeling restless. “Here’s a job for you”, said his wife. “Write a blog”. And so the 1998 Nobel laureate began to record his reflections on an almost daily basis, jubilantly freed from the constraints of fiction and awed by the “infinite page” of the internet: “that place where I can most express myself according to my desires”. So close has this blog since become to Saramago’s heart that a review of it in a Portuguese newspaper caused him to break a vow, “which hitherto I have fulfilled to the letter – never to respond to, or even comment on, any criticism of my work”. The reviewer had remarked on Saramago’s “excesses of indignation”. The blogger was outraged: “How can one talk of excesses of indignation in a country where it is specifically lacking?”
Saramago may at times be Lear-like in his umbrage, but he opens his Notebook with a “love letter” to Lisbon: “My Lisbon was always that of the poor neighbourhoods . . . the Lisbon of people who possess little and feel much, still rural in their customs and in their understanding of the world”. This romanticized view is perhaps unsurprising given the author’s distaste for capitalism and his conviction in the “definitive ankylosis of the global economic order”. Although it is not mentioned, The Notebook opens on the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, and the entire blog is permeated with a sense of anger (and vindication) at the failure of the markets, the greed of bankers and the moral degeneracy of governments. Other bugbears include literary agents; Israeli politicians; zoos; the G20; Saudi Arabia; and the youth of today. Saramago has been a member of the Portuguese Communist Party since 1969, and he saves some spleen for the shortcomings of his political allies: “The left has no fucking idea of the world it’s living in”, he writes before concluding that “Marx was never so right as he is today”. Sadly, he fails to explain exactly in which way, though he does pause to ask the “economists” and “moralists” to quantify just how many individuals “condemned to wretchedness, to overwork, to demoralization” it takes to “produce one rich person”.
Saramago is no stranger to a well-ordered political manifesto. He has twice in recent years stood as a candidate for the European Parliament. Here, however, his judgement is too often eschewed for the rhetoric of lunatic howls. It is one thing to write of Nicolas Sarkozy that “I’ve never thought much of this gentleman”; quite another to accuse George W. Bush of having “expelled truth from the world”. Saramago cannot believe that Silvio Berlusconi hails from the same country as Verdi. It is easy to mock Saramago in his ire, and two things must be said in his defence. First, there is something invigorating about his “refus[al] to accept” the world as it stands in its inequality. Second, this is a blog, and not a manifesto, and as such it is personal, fragmented and reactionary. This does, however, prompt a wider question about the “book of the blog” phenomenon, which risks forcing coherence on a body of writing that was never intended to be digested in this way.
Far more rewarding are his musings on literature, language, theology. “God”, he writes, in an echo from The Lanzarote Notebooks (as yet unpublished in English), “is the silence of the universe and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence”. Blogging has certainly inspired Saramago’s aphoristic side, and he is particularly memorable when reflecting on his literary heroes. Here he is on Fernando Pessoa: “[He] never did find out for sure who he was, but thanks to his doubts we can manage to learn a little more about who it is we are”. He writes an elegant tribute to Carlos Fuentes, who has “managed to make the greatest critical demands and the greatest ethical rigour . . . compatible with a well-chosen tie”, and introduces us to the brilliance of Javier Ortiz, who wrote his own obituary.
Saramago’s enthusiasm is irresistible and his commendations are acute. He praises Kafka “because he demonstrated that man is a beetle”, Montaigne “because he didn’t need Freud to know who he was” and Gogol “because he contemplated humanity and found it to be sad”. The more private aspects of Saramago’s blog are also very moving, whether he is being sweetly uxorious or reflecting on the day he nearly died of organ failure (“I later learned that my body was going to be displayed in the library, surrounded by books”). He was restored, he writes, “by that universal medicine called work”. He shows no signs of letting up. He signs off his blog, a year after the first entry, with news that he is starting work on a new novel. “Farewell”, he writes to his readers. “Until another day? I sincerely think not.” A quick look at the website, caderno.josesaramago.org , reveals another broken vow. Since that “final post”, there have been at least ten more.
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