Giving the peasantry a voice
By Steven Heighton |
January 6, 2013, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IT might seem surprising that only now - 14 years after Jose Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature and two years after his death - is this major novel, first published in Portugal in 1980, appearing in English translation. Then again, politically radical fiction is often a tough sell.
While Saramago was an outspoken member of his country's Communist Party ("Marx was never so right as now," he remarked at the outset of the recent global financial crisis), in his best-known work his politics are embedded in allegory or fantasy, allowing readers to view them as loosely humanist or to overlook them entirely.
Not so with "Raised From the Ground." Still, what's apt to strike readers of this book is not so much that it's radical but that it's topical. "What kind of world," it asks, "divides into those who make a profession of idleness and those who want work but can't get it?" The novel even ends with descriptions of a kind of Occupy movement, as peasants take over farm estates whose owners have relocated the workers rather than pay them a living wage.
In "Raised From the Ground," Saramago braids together 20th century Portuguese history and the lives of several generations of the fictional Mau-Tempo family (whose name means "bad weather," "the right name for the times we're living through"). The story begins at nightfall on a dirt road in southern Portugal during a heavy storm. Heading for a new home in a new hovel are the boozing shoemaker Domingos; his wife, Sara; and their son, Joao, whose blue eyes derive from a 15th century German ancestor who raped a local girl.
Saramago's loquacious narrator will repeatedly refer back to this unpunished crime, which comes to symbolize the brutal injustices that have beset the local people for centuries. The main part of the story follows blue-eyed Joao and his family as they eke out lives under regimes that are as callous to the peasants as they are amenable to the usual beneficiaries of far-right conservatism: landowners, industrialists, the army and the church.
Saramago himself was "raised from the ground" - born and reared in the world he evokes here - and his intimate knowledge of peasant life is one of several reasons the novel transcends propaganda, by a long shot. Others include his gift for lyric realizations of the countryside ("Hidden in the forest of the wheat field, the partridges are listening hard. No sound of men passing, no roaring engine, no tremulous shaking of the ears of wheat as the sickle or the whirlwind of the harvester approach").
If this novel's vision of entrenched inequalities makes it seem timely, another factor makes it aesthetically essential: By the author's own reckoning, it's the book where he found and developed his style. Readers familiar with Saramago's prose - the shifting pronouns, perspectives and tenses; the way dialogue and exposition are wedged together; the long, agglutinative sentences with their chains of spliced clauses, mischievous qualifications and omniscient interjections - will not be surprised by the writing. They will often be delighted.
There are some bathetic lapses. Comparing animals and people, Saramago crowds two trite observations into a single sentence: "The lives of human beings are far more complicated, for we are, after all, human." But such cavils fade in the heat of this book's sustained vitality, narrative sweep and earned indignation that resounds with relevance for our own time.
While Saramago was an outspoken member of his country's Communist Party ("Marx was never so right as now," he remarked at the outset of the recent global financial crisis), in his best-known work his politics are embedded in allegory or fantasy, allowing readers to view them as loosely humanist or to overlook them entirely.
Not so with "Raised From the Ground." Still, what's apt to strike readers of this book is not so much that it's radical but that it's topical. "What kind of world," it asks, "divides into those who make a profession of idleness and those who want work but can't get it?" The novel even ends with descriptions of a kind of Occupy movement, as peasants take over farm estates whose owners have relocated the workers rather than pay them a living wage.
In "Raised From the Ground," Saramago braids together 20th century Portuguese history and the lives of several generations of the fictional Mau-Tempo family (whose name means "bad weather," "the right name for the times we're living through"). The story begins at nightfall on a dirt road in southern Portugal during a heavy storm. Heading for a new home in a new hovel are the boozing shoemaker Domingos; his wife, Sara; and their son, Joao, whose blue eyes derive from a 15th century German ancestor who raped a local girl.
Saramago's loquacious narrator will repeatedly refer back to this unpunished crime, which comes to symbolize the brutal injustices that have beset the local people for centuries. The main part of the story follows blue-eyed Joao and his family as they eke out lives under regimes that are as callous to the peasants as they are amenable to the usual beneficiaries of far-right conservatism: landowners, industrialists, the army and the church.
Saramago himself was "raised from the ground" - born and reared in the world he evokes here - and his intimate knowledge of peasant life is one of several reasons the novel transcends propaganda, by a long shot. Others include his gift for lyric realizations of the countryside ("Hidden in the forest of the wheat field, the partridges are listening hard. No sound of men passing, no roaring engine, no tremulous shaking of the ears of wheat as the sickle or the whirlwind of the harvester approach").
If this novel's vision of entrenched inequalities makes it seem timely, another factor makes it aesthetically essential: By the author's own reckoning, it's the book where he found and developed his style. Readers familiar with Saramago's prose - the shifting pronouns, perspectives and tenses; the way dialogue and exposition are wedged together; the long, agglutinative sentences with their chains of spliced clauses, mischievous qualifications and omniscient interjections - will not be surprised by the writing. They will often be delighted.
There are some bathetic lapses. Comparing animals and people, Saramago crowds two trite observations into a single sentence: "The lives of human beings are far more complicated, for we are, after all, human." But such cavils fade in the heat of this book's sustained vitality, narrative sweep and earned indignation that resounds with relevance for our own time.
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