The Year of the Death of Jose Saramago

From Benjamin Kunkel from n+1…

The death of José Saramago at 87 brings to an end the career not only of arguably the greatest novelist of the last quarter century, but of a great political novelist. It was often noted that Saramago joined the Portuguese Communist party in 1968 and never resigned his membership, but most critics didn’t know how to square Saramago’s Marxism with his fiction. His politics, however, suffuse most of his novels. Even the ostensibly unpolitical Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, from 1986, amounted to a friendly quarrel with Saramago’s beloved Fernando Pessoa over the attractions of the latter’s quietism; the beauty, the consolation, and the mad loneliness of Pessoa’s profoundly ingrown personality, or personalities, acquired new and special definition against the background of Salazar’s emerging dictatorship. As for the premise of Death With Interruptions, from 2005, according to which the people of a nameless country simply stop dying as of one New Year’s Eve, this was not a mere magic-realist conceit but the framework for a meditation on the gray capitalism of aging European societies. The Cave, from 2001, despite an epigraph from The Republic, was a novel as much about reification in the Marxist as in the Platonic sense. More…