Then there are those beginning with the President of the Portuguese Republic who withdrew Saramago´s name from the European Literary Prize, with the support of the Catholic Church, for his treatment of religion. Those shallow readers do not merit my respect. Critics and others have been hung up on his never-ending sentences, often with no punctuation, avoidance of capital letters, non-use of quotation marks and much else. So he has not been welcomed easily into the literary canon, has been given short-shrift, and that is too bad. There barely exists a literary review that does not get stuck in his politics, not the Aristotelian type, but in party and ideology.

While he almost always raises controversy, there have been some literary jewels among his unmentionables. But, it ought not to be a black-or-white conclusion. It is impossible to write about him, such a polemical character, without seeming to take a stand, of acceptance or rejection, of like or dislike. Atheist, agnostic, non-believer, it doesn’t really matter.ĭon’t get me wrong, his literary and also political contribution is considerable, and only after a longer period of reflection will it be known whether, in fact, his name will remain on the books, so-to-speak. But it does get treated because Saramago caused a stir world-wide, caused by the Swedish Academy who jump-frogged over the literary establishment in Portugal at the time, and awarded a Nobel Prize to a communist, humbly-born man without a given last name. Neither fish nor fowl, neither literature nor diatribe, it does not merit the treatment that follows, neither mine nor of anyone else. Seen in the context of his symphonic literary output, this is merely the coda consisting of repeated themes, attitudes, platitudes, and railings. This book*, purportedly written in a short four months near the author´s end, seems to have been done in a “trance” as has been said. Pace, pace, literary critics, comrades, general readers, et al.

Cain by saramago