Only if we stop to think about the little things will we come to understand the big ones. Reading a book with which we identify is seeing ourselves in a new mirror, an uncomfortable one that shines for its novelty. To turn the pages is to recognize ourselves in ideas that are not ours, but that echo in the depths of our being, it is a shared identity between the author and the reader that if it can promise anything, it is that things will never be the same again.
The literature of José Saramago (1922 – 2010) is like that. Awkward, reflective, difficult, changing and many times universal. Rebel, communist and atheist, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner wrote without following punctuation rules and in his books he came to imagine the son of God as someone very human. He too allowed himself to wonder what would happen if death stopped working. Undoubtedly the reflection, after reading it, is automatic.
Here we present 4 books by this author, that if they don’t change your life, at least they will make you more human.
“Essay on Blindness” (1995)
One of Saramago’s best books and perhaps the most famous. One day, for no apparent reason, a man loses his sight, but instead of a blindness that turns off the lights and leaves everything black, the blindness is white like being in a sea of milk. Little by little the population begins to become infected (nobody knows how or in what way the disease spreads), so the protagonists are locked up in an old mental hospital where they will have to live as a blind society in which it seems that The only thing that can be expected of the human being is his descent into madness and evil.
“…blindness is also this, living in a world where hope has ended.”
“The flashes of death” (2005)
“The next day no one died.” Perhaps one of the best beginnings of a book. So prophetic and unimaginable. As if that were not enough, Saramago explains that it is an event that has never happened in the thousands of years of recorded history of humanity, and it does not end there. The novel narrates how in a country death simply does not come. People with the worst diseases and the most disastrous injuries are forced to stay alive.
Soon, people do everything possible to leave the country where no one dies, the government is experiencing crises that are only good for laughing or crying, and without a doubt, all reading is a reflective journey about human nature and the need to ask ourselves what is death and how we relate to it while we live.
“Death by itself, alone, without any outside help, has always killed much less than man.”
“All Names” (1997)
Just as Fernando Pessoa (perhaps the only Portuguese writer more important than Saramago) was a bookkeeper, in this book, Don José is a clerk at the General Conservatorship of the Civil Registry. In the absurd and monotonous routine in which he lives, he cuts out the registration cards of famous people, which he collects.
One day he finds the record of a woman he knows nothing about, not even her appearance, but the data is enough for him to fall deeply in love and begin a journey to meet the woman. A work that reflects between identity and power, what are we capable of doing if we can control another person or how far are we capable of going through an obsession? Those issues close to the work of Michel Foucault and Franz Kafka are just one of the great questions in the book.
“Only after seventy will you become wise, but then it will be of no use, neither to you nor to anyone else.”
“The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” (1991)
Undoubtedly one of Saramago’s most controversial books. It earned him the condemnation of the Church, which reproached them for giving the Nobel Prize to a communist. The wrath of the clergy only shows how magnificent and great this work is in which Saramago shows much more human portraits of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the latter having one of the most dramatic portraits you will find in literature.
Many people prefer not to read it, believing it to be a religious work, but they couldn’t be more wrong. It is a work full of redemption, philosophy and questioning.
“The point is that women learned through hard experience to swallow their tears, that’s why we say, they cry as soon as they laugh, and it’s not true, in general, they are crying inside.”
Saramago wrote briefly during his youth, but later he devoted his life to other things and did not pick up his pen again until he was around 50 years old because according to him “he had nothing to say.” Reading it is listening to a wise man, who accommodates each word and thought in the right place and will make you question the foundations of your life and existence.