Characters without names and impossible assumptions. How did Saramago engrave his novels in masterpieces of world literature?

Highlights: Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922-2010) received the Nobel Prize in 1998. He received a question from a journalist about whether he had ever imagined that he would get so fame. "I have always believed that success awaits me, and that one day, it will fall into my hands, like a ripe fruit," he said. "These novels seem to come not from a single narrator, but from a group of clever and talkative old men," he added.

The Saramagoan novel looks like a whole symphony, in which history mixes with drama, poetry and philosophy, as does the unique form invented by Saramago, and the voices of the characters, unnamed, mix.

After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1998, the Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922-2010) received a question from a journalist about whether he had ever imagined that he would get so fame. Saramago replied, "I have always believed that success awaits me, and that one day, it will fall into my hands, like a ripe fruit."

Shortly before the moment when the Portuguese novelist passed away while he was catching the fruit, the famous American writer and literary critic Harald Bloom was talking about him, considering Saramago "not only one of the best novelists, but one of the few geniuses in today's world."

These novels seem to come not from a single narrator, but from a group of clever and talkative old men who toss conversations on the port of Lisbon, smoking cigarettes.

Such a description was not strange, in a case such as Saramago, who constituted one of the striking phenomena in the art of the novel, although his entry into the writing arena came late, the most brilliant description of Saramago's writing style came from the American critic John Michaud, when he referred to the totality of his novels, saying: "These novels seem to come not from a single narrator, but from a group of intelligent and talkative old men, who toss conversations on the port of Lisbon, smoking cigarettes."

Games and tricks

It does not seem strange, when the reader is absorbed in the exciting thoughts of this writer, in which he usually starts from a question, first begins to ask it, and then rushes to be completely engaged in weaving an integrated world of details that are always able in all their paths to extract endless bursts of astonishment.

Thus, Saramago's entire work revolves around one of the ideas, through which he sees that the impossible can turn into reality, and from this assumption, he proceeds to lean on a unique literary style, to derive from it all the results that shine in the mind, and that the imagination can derive from such a hypothesis, even if it mobilizes in it, everything that was contrary to logic.

After Saramago's novel begins to ask its specific questions, the narrative soon turns into a continuous quest to answer them, completely absorbing itself in proving that hypothesis, or fabricating an answer to this question.

Saramago wonders what would happen if the Iberian Peninsula were separated from the European body and sailed in the Atlantic? This question is related to another question that has to do with Portugal's origins, destiny and ambiguous relationship with Europe: Are the Portuguese and Spanish really European?

In the 1986 novel The Stone Raft, Saramago wonders what would happen if the Iberian Peninsula were separated from the European body and sailed in the Atlantic. This question is related to another question that has to do with Portugal's origins, destiny and ambiguous relationship with Europe: Are the Portuguese and Spanish really European? For this, Saramago imagines, a rift has occurred and led to the separation of Portugal and Spain, where the island became a floating raft that walked without direction, before stopping halfway between Africa and South America.

In another surprising novel, Saramago asks whether death can decide to take leave? This is the idea behind the novel "Interruptions of Death", which takes place in a country where death is suddenly cut off from all its inhabitants, to see the spiritual and political consequences of this.

In another surprising novel, Saramago asks whether death can decide to take time off? This is the idea behind the novel "Interruptions of Death", which takes place in a country where death is suddenly cut off from all its inhabitants, to see the spiritual and political consequences of this.

Saramago says the narrative is inspired by this idea: people stop dying in a landlocked country and a secret group in collaboration with the government transports the dying out of the border for burial. Death is embodied in a woman having an affair with a cellist. "I don't see it as a love story at all, even if some consider the novel to be a triumph of love over death, because that interpretation, in my view, is nothing more than an illusion," Saramago says of her.

In The Story of the Siege of Lisbon, the question he asks is: Can history be falsified with the stroke of a pen? This confirms the possibility of happening, through a proofreader placing the negative character inside the text. Thus he can so simply falsify history.

The Story of the Siege of Lisbon (Al Jazeera)

The 1984 novel "The Year of Ricardo Reyes's Death", Saramago continued his amazing games, replacing the fictional characters invented by the writer and poet Fernando Pessoa with flesh and blood characters, and making them meet the poet and talk to him for a whole year, despite the fact that the poet is dead.

In the 1984 novel The Year of Death of Ricardo Reis, Saramago continued his amazing games, replacing the fictional characters invented by the writer and poet Fernando Pessoa with flesh and blood characters, and making them meet the poet and talk to him for a whole year, despite the fact that the poet is dead. He stressed in this novel that life is a book that we will not be able to complete, no matter how good we write or read it.

The Year of Ricardo Reis's Death (Al Jazeera)

In his novel The Elephant March, which deals with the naivety of the human species, Saramago traces the journey of the Indian elephant "Solomon", which King John III gifted to Crown Prince Archduke Maximiliani II of Austria. "99% of it is pure fiction," he says. "I was fascinated by the idea that an elephant's journey is a metaphor for life, because each of us knows that he will die, but no one knows the circumstances of his death," he says.

Novel "The March of the Elephant" (Island)

Sudden questions

Saramago continues to ask his sudden questions, and in his 1995 novel Blindness, in which he abandoned the use of names altogether, instead referring to each character by mentioning some of their own distinctive qualities. Saramago wondered what would happen if everyone went blind. In this novel, an entire mysterious country is struck by a mysterious epidemic. Here, this novel talks about the moral blindness of human beings and the destruction that it can lead to in terms of human civilization.

The events revolve around a strange epidemic, which spreads infections among people, to the extent that the government quarantines the blind, and soon all citizens turn blind. In a country without a name, logic and reason are unraveling, chaos is rife and human tendencies are amplified, until they eventually destroy civilization.

Novel "Blindness" (Al Jazeera)

The idea of the novel "Blindness" also sheds light on the human side, represented by the doctor, his wife and his family, who remained together until the disease suddenly disappeared, as it appeared.

Saramago left Lisbon and moved to the Canary Islands. There he wrote this novel, which also talks about intellectual blindness, which is summarized by the words of the doctor's wife at the end of the novel: "I do not think that we are blind, but I think that we are blind to see, blind human beings who can see but do not see", also indicating that human morality and human principles are fragile, in the face of human destitution.

All Names

In the novel "All Names", which revolves around the life of Don Jose, an employee in the civil registry, who from time to time, seeks to cut off time, by preparing a set of cards consisting of a hundred celebrities, but this employee suddenly found the name of an unknown woman, so he decided to pursue her, but discovered that she died, which he felt deserved his attention, more than the one he allocated to these celebrities.

The novel "All Names" by José Saramago translated by Saleh Almani (Al Jazeera)

The novel "All Names" is packed with characters without names: all of which revolve between the director of the public archives, his two deputies, the registry staff, the doctor, the nurse, a woman living on the ground floor, the shepherd, the guards of the public cemetery, and other characters who do not have names, so that we know nothing about them, except their descriptions or the positions they occupy, while there was only one person, the one with the name "José", the employee who worked A civil registry clerk, whose task is limited to recording data related to marriages, births and deaths.

In "All Names", as in his other novels, Saramago uses polyphonic narration and writes dialogues in a seemingly overlapping way, in which the novel begins from inside the building of the General Archives of the Civil Registry, where all records related to names are kept. Don Jose plays the role of the main character of the novel, even in the context of an obscure employee, performing a chore that does not change.

We know nothing about José other than this name, and in fact he counts the first part of his name, since Saramago only tells us two surnames for him in the birth register in the public archives, one of which is his father's surname and the other that of his mother, but we also do not know them, and this is justified by the narrative, when he says:

"When Don asks Jose for his name, or when circumstances require him to introduce himself, I am so-and-so, it will not help him to pronounce the full name, because his interlocutors will only keep in their memory the first word, José, to which they add or do not then add the word 'Don'." Jose, 50, lives in a room adjacent to the archive building, and has lived his years, without a wife or children, and uses the door that connects them in the adventures of his evening sneak into the building, to get celebrity cards, copy them in his own record, and through the information he collects about them, tries to predict the events of their future lives. Other than that woman whose card suddenly appeared in his life.

Jose, whose name we know, while Saramago refers to others in their official functions, one day he withdrew 5 celebrity cards, but it was 6 because there was one that he accidentally withdrawn, and this card belongs to an unknown thirtieth woman, Jose remained confused, does he return this card? Or looking for a woman? He settled the matter and decided that his goal would be to search for this unknown woman, so that his life would change after that, and take another path for her.

He continued to reflect on life, death and human transformations. He stops at why he took an interest in this particular woman, even though he had never had any knowledge of her. "Maybe I won't talk to her when I find her in front of me, if that's the case, why would I look for her? Why am I investigating the details of her life? I'm collecting papers about the bishop as well, and I'm not interested in talking to him one day, it seems to me absurd, it's really just absurd."

The Saramagoan novel looks like a complete symphony, in which history mixes with drama, poetry and philosophy, just as the unique form invented by Saramago, in which the written text is closer to a single block, devoid of any punctuation mark, and in which the voices of the characters, unnamed, are mixed, which can only be distinguished by amplifying the first letter of that phrase spoken by the speaker.

Typing characteristics

In doing so, Saramago continues to supplement most of his novels with multiple layers, open to historical and philosophical references, while retaining that innate wonder that stems from folk tales and the summary of anecdotal wisdom.

Even if this experimental method that he has been pursuing, is characterized by its long sentence, sometimes exceeding an entire page. Using flowing vertebrae. In any dialogue, any reader can easily find a lot of paragraphs that span several pages non-stop, even without Saramago resorting to putting quotation marks. At the same time, it is preferable to capitalize the capitalization.

Pre-fame suffering

In 1947, Saramago released his first novel, The Land of Sin, and then worked on several novels, but he was unsuccessful, and stopped after writing several pages. In dire need, he found temporary work at Ma'aden in 1949, and the following year, he took up a job as a production manager at a publishing house. He then started working in the field of translation, starting in 1955, and continued to do so for about 6 years. His experience resulted in the translation of many different books by famous writers such as Tolstoy, Raymond Baer, Jean Casso and Barr Lagerkvist.

He stayed away from writing for nearly 20 years, before returning in 1966 and publishing his first collection of poems, Possible Poems. He published a book of poetry in 1970, "Maybe Joy", followed by two volumes of newspaper articles, "This World and the Other" and "The Traveler's Luggage", after which he joined the editorial team of the newspaper "Diario de Lisbon", and two years later, moved to the daily "Diario de Noticias", to work as deputy director, in 1974. Before that happened, José Saramago had endured the details of his difficult childhood days, when the family was so poor and his father was a policeman, an alcoholic, to the point where the drink took over most of his salary.

Whenever Saramago recalled those days, he would point out that as a boy he worked as a shepherd with his grandfather: "I used to dig up the ground, bring firewood to the fireplace, and many times I turned the wheel of the village well, and many times I moved water on my shoulder. I still remember those days when I would go with my grandmother, to collect straw, so we could use it as a bed, to sleep on it."

In the end, that was what drove him to drop out of school and work as a locksmith, before later becoming a street vendor for newspapers.

Late fame

Fame came in the end, even if it was late, and then Saramago joined a few who began to achieve popularity in the later years, until he became the most famous among them, and despite this delay, he managed to win the Nobel Prize, after his novels earned him fame, despite exceeding the sixties.

Saramago's story is stimulating and exciting, and provides a model for beginnings, at a time when many believe that the time is no longer right to seek a new beginning.

However, Saramago took many jobs to earn a living, and did not rely on writing as a source of livelihood until 1974, the paradigm shift in his life, came after the novel "Earth Revolution" published in 1980, which made him at the forefront of writers in the world of literature.

The Earth Revolution by José Saramago (Al Jazeera)

Before that, when fame had not knocked on his doors, he continued to work as a car mechanic and a worker in the metal industry, and did not dedicate himself to writing, until he was in his fifties, and did not even achieve his great achievement until he was sixty years old with his fourth novel, published in 1982, entitled "The Monument", which is set in Lisbon in the 18th century and takes place in an atmosphere echoing the Inquisition.

Saramago as a writer

Saramago describes this period: "I got up one morning and said to myself, 'It's time to find out if you can be what you claim to be your truth, a writer.'"

He did not stop there, and at the age of 25, when he sent his novel "The Land of Sin" for printing, he did not find a publisher for it, so his friends collected the costs of printing 500 copies that did not find anyone to buy, then the matter was resolved, and he decided to stop writing, and told his brother that he needed to read more, then he stopped writing for more than 15 years, and he tried his luck with poetry, and when he issued in 1966 a book entitled "Possible Poems", he met with the same neglect:

"These first attempts made me understand that I had nothing to say. In that case, I would better shut up."

At the age of 50, Saramago discovered that his previous experiences had nothing to do with literature, and that he did not know why he wrote or how he should write. He saw then, that the time had come, to write a novel in which something different appears, but the first pages of the novel came similar to the first, and when he reached the 25th page, he realized that his writing method was traditional, and that the punctuation marks were all present, as the sentences were short, then, he hurried to take out the box of matches, set those papers on fire, and then rewrote the novel again, and said:

"I was writing in a new way, a few long sentences, in which the voices of the different characters blend into a sentence. That was the beginning."

Nobel and Saramago

When the Swedish Academy chose Saramago for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, the announcement came as a surprise to him, because he was about to travel to Germany to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The committee summed up Saramago's literary style when announcing his winning, saying, "The prize is awarded to Mr. José de Sousa, who, with many symbols and proverbs steeped in imagination with human paradoxes, has constantly given us a virtual reality that we can grasp accurately." Perhaps this is in line with the Commission's declaration of praising his "recent skepticism of official facts", for example, it contradicts the conviction that imagining death as something outside of us: "The death of each of us is born with our birth and we carry it within us". This prompted the committee to praise his "symbolism accompanied by imagination, emotion and irony" as well.

Saramago was not only an accomplished novelist, but also a posturer, who never gave up expressing it clearly during the Second Palestinian Intifada: during his visit to Ramallah in March 2002, Saramago said, "What is happening in Palestine is a crime of the same type as what happened in Auschwitz... Based on the immunity that surrounds the Israeli people and their armies. They have become people who benefit from the Holocaust."

Saramago positions

These statements prompted some critics to protest these words, considering them anti-Semitic. But six months later, Saramago explained, "What is disturbing about my statement is not that I condemned what the Israeli authorities are doing, and their commission of war crimes, they are used to such statements. What really bothers them are specific words they can't stand. And since I mentioned "Auschwitz"... And note well, I didn't say Ramallah resembles Auschwitz, because that would be ridiculous. What I said was that the spirit of Auschwitz was present in Ramallah. We were 6 book. All made statements condemning Israel, Lee Soyinka, Brighton Breitenbach, Vincenzo Conslo and others. The Israelis were not bothered by them. But because I put a finger on Auschwitz's wound and it made them jump."

Saramago is one of the great novelists whose names will remain immortal, no matter how many years pass, just as his creations will remain impressive and timeless. In addition to his amazing ideas and the wonderful attitudes of humanity, comes his devotion to the art of the novel, through which he continued to believe that a good novel must be based on firm and solid foundations, which led him to compare his work to the work of the carpenter of chairs:

"Writing a novel is like the process of forming a chair, one must be able to sit on it, and be balanced on top of it."