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10.07.2014

1998 • Jose Saramago • Small Memories

Small Memories (2006)
Small Memories is not the first book I’ve ever read by Jose Saramago, the Nobel Laureate and only writer working in the Portuguese language that’s ever been honored by the Swedish Academy. It’s not even the second or third.

Let’s just say that I’ve read quite a few books by Saramago and have many more sitting on my bookshelves, simply awaiting a moment of my free time to be read. He probably holds the record in my library for most books written by one author. This came about twofold. 

First, I like his work a great deal and so naturally have gravitated towards it over the years. And secondly, a few years ago an innovative online bookshop sadly went out of business and I gobbled up everything they had by him. I’m hardcore. ;)

Having said all that, his prolificacy has ensured that barring being a Saramago scholar, one can still be surprised by little volumes that might pop up here and there. That’s how I came to read Small Memories.

I’d started a now-defunct blog and during one of the months - it was a monthly blog - I’d decided I would read as many books by Camões Prize winners as I could. 

That exalted number ended up being two.

Yep, two books.
But they were both really good books.
And one of them was a little discovery by my old favorite Saramago.

This isn’t a novel, or a collection of short stories, or a play, or a collection of essays. All of these he has written - many of each kind in fact - but instead a memoir. 

He’s also written a series of those, most famously about his latter years. They’d come out every year or two and would chronicle his life post-Nobel with his wife Pilar, spent in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, off of Spain.

A Portuguese Nobel Laureate living in Spain? He famously decamped to Spain, after a famous snafu involving the current President of Portugal - Cavaco Silva - back when he was still the Prime Minister. A European literary competition - the Aristeion Prize - wanted Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to represent Portugal. The PM saw the book as sacrilegious and stopped it being included. Saramago, not too unfairly really, felt like his country did not appreciate him and decided to self-exile. He of course returned for visits, but he would never again permanently live in Portugal after this official slap on the face.

But I digress.

As I said before, Saramago has written plenty of memoirs, but I feel this one is a precious little gem. It tells of his childhood and adolescence, spent between a small village in Alentejo and Lisbon - of small slights that stayed with him for decades, of the hunger for literature when there is none to be had.

It was a joy to read, filling me up with longing for my own childhood also spent in Lisbon, in some of the same places he mentions, and in one particular case, the exact neighborhood I started out my own life in.

A very young José Saramago
Picheleira, an oft forgot working-class area, nowadays overlooked by its’ more well known neighbor Olaias, was the first place the Saramago family lived in when they moved to Lisbon. I can’t begin to explain how much this small fact overwhelmed me. I’ve always felt a special affinity with Saramago and to find out that we both spent our early childhood dwelling amidst the same old buildings I so well remember, filled me with joy.

But well, that’s just me. You, dear reader, are unlikely to share this little factoid with Saramago, so why should you pick up this little tome?

Because it’s wonderful and lovely and sad and true, even when it isn’t.

“Sometimes I wonder if certain memories are really mine or if they’re just someone else’s memories of episodes in which I was merely an unwitting actor and which I found out about later when they were told to me by others who had been there, unless, of course, they, too, had only heard the story from someone else.” p.53

More often than I like, this has happened to me. A well remembered childhood detail come to be debunked by an older relative - “A Fiat? In the 70s? Your uncle never owned a Fiat.” But yet where did my so very clear memory of riding inside one come from? Watching films? Hearing a story about someone else?

Saramago talks of his first inkling of lust, of his preference for his maternal grandparents, of being so thirsty to read, anything at all, that he’d devour the newspapers glued to the wall that some poor people would use as wallpaper. He tells of a whole lifetime, because yes, one’s childhood is a whole other lifetime away, in a small little volume.

“There you were, Grandma, sitting on the sill outside your house, open to the vast, starry night, to the sky of which you knew nothing and through which you would never travel, to the silence of the fields and the shadowy trees, and you said, with all the serenity of your ninety years and the fire of an adolescence never lost: “The world is so beautiful, it makes me sad to think I have to die.” In those exact words. I was there.” p.120

There is so much more, but really just go and read it for yourself. You can thank me later.