The death of the Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago last Friday seems likely to spawn an international retrospective of his work. To mark the occasion, we’ve taken a look back through the New Statesman archives for reviews of his work.
Most recently Tom Cameron, reviewing the “dazzling satirical display” of Saramago’s 2008 novel Death at Intervals, praised the author’s distinctive tone:
Throughout his fiction, he has cultivated an entertaining and witty blend of logic and absurdity, and his work is characterised by an obsessive search for the right words and names even as he is amused by their arbitrariness.
Writing of Seeing in 2006, John Gray highlighted the struggle between Saramago’s political convictions and his aesthetic agenda:
At some level Saramago must realise that his political hopes are delusive and absurd. In Seeing, he blinds himself to this fact while allowing his characters the dubious gift of sight. Contrary to everything Saramago wishes to believe, the book is haunted by the thought that the world’s most serious problems have no political solution. It is as if the ghost of Pessoa had re-appeared, smiling, to mock him in his dreams.
Henry Sheen’s review of The Cave in 2002 drew attention to a structural development in Saramago’s writing:
While Saramago’s previous novels often languish and fade as they come to an end, The Cave has a decisive shape and clarity to the ending. The discovery of the cave is the final piece that makes the novel perfect and enlightens everything that has gone before.
Back in 1999, Robert Winder named Saramago’s All the Names as one of his picks for book of the year:
It traces the effects of a clerical error on the life of the world, and is both light and grave, elaborate and simple. A lovely adventure, a search for an unknown woman, floats on sentences that topple over one another like waves.
Saramago had intended to visit this year’s Edinburgh Festival to promote his new novel The Elephant’s Journey. That book, together with Cain, due next year, will complete the translation of his oeuvre into English.
Rebecca Carter, Saramago’s editor at Harvill Secker, praised his work as, “one of the most important of the last century — radical, witty, humane, endlessly challenging and questioning”.