A PROPHET WHO DENIES HIMSELF
Fernanda Eberstadt writes
Quote:
His first big success was Balthasar and Blimunda in 1987.
Set in 18th-century Portugal, Saramagos novel tells the story of a trio of misfits caught up in the Inquisition: a priest bent on constructing a flying machine and the two lovers who serve him a one-handed ex-soldier named Balthasar, and Blimunda, a sorceresss daughter. The novel is eccentric, rambling, humorous, touching. In it you see already crystallized the authors enduring habits and preoccupations: his love of lists; his ex-mechanics fascination with how things are made, whether it be a bellows or a prosthetic hand; his at-once rudimentary and impossibly romantic conception of male-female relations. (In Saramagos novels, a man and a woman fall in love and are forever fused in a lifetimes ecstatic, round-the-clock coupling, a perpetual readiness to rut aided by the fact that in his world there are no children to get in the way.)...
THAT'S BADQuote:
Saramagos most distinctive trademark is his punctuation, or rather the lack of it. His fictions are constructed in run-on sentences disrupted by only commas, a flood of prose in which narrative observation, individuals thoughts and dialogue go unmarked. In addition, many of his books refer to one another, and all the characters talk exactly alike, giving their conversations the feel of an internal monologue. It is as if a continuous reel of a silent film were being projected in a movie theater that is empty save for one extremely garrulous spectator.
That spectator is Saramagos narrator, an unidentified personality who presides over all the novels. The literary critic James Wood has described this narrators voice as that of a sly old Portuguese peasant, who knows everything and nothing. The narrator is slightly split, as if, like Saramagos Ricardo Reis, he were always just on the verge of realizing he is the figment of someone elses imagination. His tone is jocular, grumpy, laboriously facetious; he is fond of truisms and of faux-naf theological speculation (does God have one eye or two? Can the Devil fly?). Yet he is also a postmodernist by inclination, fascinated by semantics and the art of grammar. Occasionally, these dual modes village gossip and literary theoretician converge in such beguiling throwaways as: The objectivity of the narrator is a modern invention, we need only reflect that our Lord God didnt want it in his book.
If Saramago and his narrator are not quite the same person, they do, however, share a fundamental pessimism. Im not delivering any news if I tell you the world is a piece of hell for millions of people, Saramago said to me. There are always a few who manage to find a way out, humans are capable of the best as well as the worst, but you cant change human destiny. We live in a dark age, when freedoms are diminishing, when there is no space for criticism, when totalitarianism the totalitarianism of multinational corporations, of the marketplace no longer even needs an ideology, and religious intolerance is on the rise. Orwells 1984 is already here....
NOW THAT WAS A TRUE AND CORRECT OBSERVATION!Quote:
...Saramagos novels seem, like the flying machine in Baltasar and Blimunda, to be propelled by the sheer force of human will. Sometimes their authors mulishness leaves him, in his public life, stuck up a tree, with his unswerving allegiance to a political ideology that has buttressed many of the worlds most murderous tyrannies. But long after Saramagos dusty jeremiads are forgotten, readers will still relish his sly tales of one-handed soldiers and sorceresses daughters, of proofreaders with the power to overturn history with an inserted not.
________________________________________
Katherine Vaz writes in "BOMB" Magazine:
Quote:Giovanni Pontiero (Translator)
In 1991, the Portuguese government, bowing to pressure from the Catholic Church, blocked the nomination of his controversial The Gospel According to Jesus Christ for Europe's Ariosto competition.
REVIEW:
Quote:Kathleen Norris, Lemmon P.L., S.D. writes:
Joseph overhears a conversation that allows him to save his fledgling family from the slaughter of the innocents. Because he lacks the courage to warn others in Bethlehem, God turns him into a spiritual pariah and, as part of God's justice, he is mistakenly crucified. Tormented by his earthly father's guilt, Jesus leaves his family, wanders around in the wilderness with a freethinking Devil, is told of his destiny by God, performs some miracles and, in a fast summing up, ends up dead.
Quote:
Christian writers have often downplayed the earthier aspects of the Incarnation, but here Jesus is "identified as a shepherd by the smell of goat." God says that it is "dissatisfaction, one of the qualities which make man in My image and likeness," which led him to desire a son on Earth. "There will be a church," God tells Jesus, giving a lengthy martyrology as evidence. Jesus dies as do many of us, lamenting "a life planned for death from the very beginning."
Christopher Forbes writes:
Quote:
Let's get this warning written upfront first...if you...in any other way easily offended by an unorthodox and even blasphemous portrait of one of the most revered and worshiped figures in human history, skip this book entirely....From the first glowing chapter of this book, I was hooked. Saramago begins the work with a poetic description of the traditional icon of Christ's crucifixion. But from that moment, he wanders far from the Gospel accounts. The first half of the book concerns the events of Christ's birth and boyhood. Joseph, by not warning the citizens of Bethlehem of the murder of the innocents, incurs a bloodguilt that he cannot absolve except by his own mistaken death on the cross years later. This death of his earthly father along with the accompanying sense of bloodguilt haunts the young Jesus and sends him off on a journey to find his own true purpose in life. He spends years as a shepherd apprentice with a man named Pastor who ultimately is the Devil. He meets and falls in love with Mary Magdelene, with whom he lives without the benefit of marriage. He discovers his amazing powers healing and miracle working long before he has any idea of how he is to use them. All through this section, familiar passages from the Gospels such as the calling of the disciples, the walking on the water, and the feeding of the five thousand are presented in unfamiliar guises. Finally, in the last chapter, all of the events of the canonical gospels are condensed into a searing climax....Saramago senses the great paradox between the "all good" God and the need for the atonement of His Son. Saramago's portrait of God is almost a caricature. God is bombastic, greedy for worship and power, and ultimately vain. In many ways, Saramago's version of God resembles the Demiurge of the Gnostics or the Urizen of William Blake....a petty creator god who wants the whole deal for himself. And in Pastor, Saramago creates a devil who's biggest motivator is compassion for the plight of humanity. At times, these characters approach broad comedy....
