Book review: The Notebook
THERE are Lord knows how many bloggers publishing their opinions on the internet, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions by now or next week. Not many of them will have their effusions collected and published as a book, in hardback moreover. Not many will have their work translated. But then even fewer have, like Jos Saramago, been awarded the Nobel prize for literature.
Actually, this blog, a record running from September 2008 to the last day of August 2009, is not, as its author admits, what is usually considered to be a "real blog". It doesn't contain any links and "I don't have a dialogue with my readers" and "don't interact with the rest of the blogosphere". The Notebook is therefore best thought of as just that, a series of daily jottings which happens to have been first published on the internet, but which might just as well have appeared as a daily newspaper column.
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Hide AdIt is old-fashioned in manner, tone and outlook. This is not surprising because Saramago is now well advanced into his ninth decade. This makes his range of interests and capacity for indignation the more remarkable and admirable.
In one of the later entries (3 August 2009) he remarks that writers fall into two categories: those "capable of forging new paths in literature" and a larger group consisting "of those who make their own way following in the first group's footsteps". Most of us, even the most conceited among us – and conceit is not rare among writers – come sadly and reluctantly to accept that, no matter how lofty our ambition once was, we belong to this second group. Saramago, as I fancy he knows, is a member of the first. So almost everything he writes is of some interest.
Almost everything. The qualification is necessary. One note on Chaplin, for example, suggests his face was made for tragedy rather than comedy; a point to argue, though not a cogent one. More importantly, a great novelist may have commonplace political opinions. When Saramago writes about politics he is as predictable as a Guardian columnist such as Polly Toynbee, and no more interesting. The usual targets are hit – George W Bush, Israel, Berlusconi and neo-liberals – little, here, that one hasn't wearily read countless times. It is nice to find him applying Cicero's denunciation of Catiline to Berlusconi, but a more judicious inquirer might pause to consider the extent to which what he calls "the Berlusconi-thing" is not a symptom of the deep-rooted and long-enduring corruption of Italian public life rather than its cause. Likewise, it is reasonable that Saramago, who passed the first half of his life while Salazar was dictator of Portugal and Franco dictator of Spain, should be more conscious of the crimes of the Right than those of the Left, but the assumption that political virtue is to be found only on the Left is inexcusably nave. Franco was vile, certainly; but how about Stalin?
Nevertheless, Saramago's indignation is usually generous, well-founded and well-expressed. He writes admirably about the obscenity of torture. Bull-fighting and all cruelty to animals disgust him – he is very good indeed on animals, especially his own family dog. He speaks up for the plight of refugees and for the wretched of the earth.
Some here in Britain, where religious faith is tepid and the churches timid, may be surprised by the depth of his hostility to the Roman Catholic Church, but Portugal and Spain were dominated by the Church for centuries, and Saramago is an old-fashioned anti-clerical and a 20th-century liberal secularist and atheist.
He is at his best, not surprisingly, when writing about literature. Many of the authors he speaks of are either unknown, or little known, to readers here. This too is not surprising. For a long time British publishers were rarely interested in commissioning translations of works by any but the most famous foreign-language novelists. Indeed with a few exceptions, such as Harvill Secker, Canongate, Arcadia Books and the indefatigable Christopher Maclehose, this is still, sadly, the case. Perhaps Saramago's praise for some still unknown here will encourage publishers to have their works translated. That said, on the evidence of this book, Saramago himself has no great interest in English-language writers. He does however write illuminatingly about Kafka to whom he devotes one outstandingly good blog, and Jean Giono.
This is not a work to read through from beginning to end, but to dip into. Treated in this way, it will give a lot of pleasure.