The Leonard Cohen of World Lit
You could easily have got
the wrong impression of José Saramago from the flood of press reports last week
when it was announced that he'd won this year's Nobel Prize for literature. The
gist of the coverage was that Saramago, a Portuguese novelist known for his
playful excavations of Iberian history, is the real thing , an inheritor
of the majestic European literary tradition and the last best hope for the
serious novel. His life story enhances this image of fragile purity: He's a
late bloomer who didn't publish a mature work until his 50s and didn't become
famous until his 60s. His picture in the New York Times had something to
do with it too: At 75, squinting and overcome with emotion, he looked like a
mole emerging from an underground tunnel--or, with his thick eyeglasses and
white-fringed bald dome, like Mr. Magoo.
"Even
I've never heard of me!" is how a friend of mine meanly translated
Saramago's befuddled expression. That's a wee bit unfair, of course. Although
Saramago isn't very well known in the United States, throughout the 1990s he
has attracted a zealous international following. Besides, when journalists
report that his sentences are long and obscure, his stories intertextual and
ambitious, they miss the real point of Saramago, which is that he's really
pretty accessible. Perhaps more than any living writer I know, Saramago gives
his readers a taste of the exquisite high you get when you first fall in love
with books. No matter where you sit down with one of his novels, you feel like
you're up past bedtime, reading with a flashlight, taking a break from your
humdrum life to commune with something magic and deep and eternal. The irony is
that Saramago uses some very contemporary methods to whip up this madeleine
reminder of classic literature. He's a good writer, occasionally a great
writer, but mostly he's a pop star of a writer, working the crowd into states
of childish longing and bliss.
Saramago is often said to unite his native European
skepticism with the Latin American school of magical realism. This is true up
to a point. Like Jorge Luis Borges, he flirts with science fiction premises and
invents antique literary texts and then analyzes them. His two most Borgesian
works are The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), an
hommage to the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and The History
of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), in which a proofreader inserts a single
word--"not"--into a single sentence in a book he's checking, thereby
questioning every celebrated theme of Portuguese history. As much as they are
about people, Year of the Death and History are about writing and
what it can and cannot do.
What
distinguishes Saramago from Borges is his tenderness and his explicit, even
obsessive, curiosity about human emotion. Conventional literary history says
that the novel came into its own in the 18 th century, alongside
individual rights and a modern conception of marriage. Saramago tries to figure
out what it means to love when those conditions don't apply. Baltasar and
Blimunda (1982) is a romance set in Portugal during the Inquisition. The
suspenseful and brilliant Blindness (1995), his latest book published in
English, tells the fantastic story of an epidemic that leaves the whole world
unable to see. A quasi-Borgesian conceit, but Saramago uses it to ask how
people love when disaster upsets the social norms. (The answer is atrociously,
although a few good souls do their best.)
Unlike Borges, Saramago is an outspoken
political activist of a decidedly left-wing slant. As a younger man, he cheered
on the 1974 revolution that liberated Portugal from a long, sleepy
dictatorship. Lately he's supported agrarian reform in Brazil, and last March
he visited the Mexican jungle to express his solidarity with the Chiapas
rebels. The day the Nobel was announced, Saramago was at the Frankfurt book
fair to deliver a speech on what it means to be a Communist writer today. His
party affiliation made the Wall Street Journal so apoplectic that it
published an op-ed this week declaring it all but a crime to give him the Nobel
Prize. But he is a most modest militant: At this point in history, he said,
communism is essentially a "spiritual state," a compassionate safeguard against
the built-in injustice of capitalism.
His
politics, rare warmth, and long and many-claused sentences have earned Saramago
a second comparison, this one to Gabriel García Márquez. But if he's too human
to be another Borges, he's too intellectual and urbane to be another García
Márquez. His characters don't have cousins and neighbors and colorful,
labyrinthine histories. In fact, we often know next to nothing about his
characters, except that they are lonely, bookish rolling stones who gather no
moss, spending several hours a day wandering around Lisbon and daydreaming.
(The male characters, anyway. Saramago's women tend to be motherly souls who
either sweetly have sex with the men or else show them how to settle down.)
Ithink a slightly less literary comparison is in order.
There's a revealing moment in The
History of the Siege of Lisbon ,
when the shy proofreader hero, a bachelor in his 50s, is working at home. The
television plays silently in the background, and the proofreader looks over and
notices that, of all people in the world, Leonard Cohen has appeared on the
screen. "Raimundo Silva bent over, turned on the sound, Leonard Cohen made a
gesture as if to thank him, now he could sing, and sing he did, he sang of
things only someone who has lived can sing of, and asks himself how much and
for what, someone who has loved and asks himself who and why, and, having asked
all these questions, he can find no answer, not one, contrary to the belief
that all the answers are there and that all we have to do is to learn how to
phrase our questions."
Note the admiration for Cohen
and the chanting musicality of this passage (beautifully translated by Giovanni
Pontiero), the echoes and variations circling around a bittersweet theme. Note
also Saramago's detached melancholy, his brainy anti-elitism, his characters
who are lovable but archetypal and abstract. All these qualities critics have
identified as traits of the Great European Novel mixed with magical realism are
also the traits of the cool, alienated, allusion-dropping singer-songwriter.
Cohen has always been praised as the poet laureate of songsters. Why shouldn't
Saramago be the songwriter laureate of novelists?
Which leaves me a caveat:
There's a reason most good songs lasts between five and 10 minutes while a
novel usually demands a few days. At some point, ideally, the novel should go
deeper than the song. Saramago is never boring--his command over his material
is too impressive for that. He can get a little precious, though, and his
constant musing about fate can get repetitive, less like Leonard Cohen and more
like John Mellencamp, with his message that "life goes on, long after the
thrill of living is gone." I marveled at Saramago's ingenuity when I reread him
last weekend; I also wondered at a few points if, with his brand of cute
obscurity, he was really Nobel material. But I do know that the man can write a
tune, or at least the literary equivalent, and it sure is catchy.
