The Collected Novels of José Saramago Read Free

darkness, its protagonist the clerk Senhor José, driven to seek the person behind one of the innumerable names in the files of the Registry, if not exactly a love story, is a story about love.
    After the Journey to Portugal, a detailed guidebook of his native land not included in this anthology, Saramago wrote The Cave, which I have to say in some ways I like the best of all, because I like the people in it so much. Saramago will tell us what the book is about—though when he wrote this in The Notebook he wasn’t talking about his novel but about the world he saw in May 2009:
Every day species of plants and animals are disappearing, along with languages and professions. The rich always get richer and the poor always get poorer ... Ignorance is expanding in a truly terrifying manner. Nowadays we have an acute crisis in the distribution of wealth. Mineral exploitation has reached diabolical proportions. Multinationals dominate the world. I don’t know whether shadows or images are screening reality from us. Perhaps we could discuss the subject indefinitely; what is already clear is that we have lost our critical capacity to analyze what is happening in the world. We seem to be locked inside Plato’s cave. We have jettisoned our responsibility for thought and action. We have turned ourselves into inert beings incapable of the sense of outrage, the refusal to conform, the capacity to protest, that were such strong features of our recent past. We are reaching the end of a civilization and I don’t welcome its final trumpet. In my opinion, neoliberalism is a new form of totalitarianism disguised as democracry, of which it retains almost nothing but a semblance. The shopping mall is the symbol of our times. But there is still another miniature and fast-disappearing world, that of small industries and artisanry...
    This is the framework of The Cave, an extraordinarily rich book that uses science-fictional extrapolation with great skill in the service of a subtle and complex philosophical meditation that is at the same time, and above all, a powerful novel of character. It is worth noting that one of the principal characters is a dog.
    In 2004 came The Double, which I found rather hard going but have not yet reread, so my judgment on it now would be worthless. After that came Seeing, which picks up the setting and some of the characters of Blindness but uses them in an entirely different way (nobody could accuse Saramago of writing the same book over, or anything like the same book). It is a heavy-hitting political satire, very dark—far darker, paradoxically, in its end and implications than Blindness.
    By now the author was well into his eighties, and not surprisingly chose to write a book about death. Death with Interruptions is the English title. The premise is irresistible. Death (who isn’t one person but many, each with a locality she’s responsible for—bureaucracy, after all, is everywhere) gets sick of her job and takes a vacation from it. This is a major theme in Saramago, the humble employee who decides to do something just a little out of line, just this once ... So in the region for which this particular Death is responsible, nobody dies. The resulting problems are drawn with a very dry humor. Death herself is an interesting person, but to me the book comes alive (if I may put it so) halfway through, with the appearance of the cellist, and the dog.
    In the year in which I am writing this, 2010, The Elephant’s Journey was published in English, very shortly after the author’s death. If it were his last book, no author could have a more perfect final word—but it isn’t his last. There is Cain yet to come, the novel whose name he wouldn’t tell anybody while he was writing it because, he said, if you knew that, you’d know everything about it. Which is hardly the case ... but soon we’ll know.
    The true story of the elephant, Solomon, who walked and went by ship from Portugal to Vienna in the sixteenth