Raised from the Ground by José Saramago

First published in Portuguese in 1980; published in translation by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on December 4, 2012

José Saramago’s death in 2010 was a sad loss for the world of literature, but his novels endure.  It is often difficult to know what to make of a Saramago novel.  He infuses drama with humor so as to make them indistinguishable, relies upon fantasy to illuminate reality, distorts history to help us understand the present.  Saramago merges philosophy with storytelling.  With keen observation, he chronicles moral failings while remaining an extraordinarily forgiving writer.  Unlike nature, which “displays remarkable callousness when creating her various creatures,” Saramago displays compassion and understanding when creating his flawed characters.

Raised from the Ground is the story of the latifundio, the Portuguese landed estates and those who toil upon them. The laborers are the victims of "infinite misfortune, inconsolable grief, both of which lasted from the nineteenth century to the day before yesterday." Plagues, famines, wars, and the cruel overseers of the latifundio are the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the "great evils" that devastate the working poor. The workers spend their lives as if "tethered to a stake," governed by arbitrariness, and in a state of perpetual hunger. Is death the only escape, or is change possible? Fighting for a minimum wage and an eight hour day may seem futile, but futility is a way of life in the latifundio. It is the need to fight for change that compels the narrator to proclaim: "we are not men if we do not raise ourselves up from the ground."

With their meager possessions loaded onto a donkey cart, the shoemaker Domingos Mau-Tempo and his wife (Sara da Conceição) and son (João) make their way to their new home in São Cristóvão, the first of several relocations Domingos will impose upon his family. Domingos' miserable story (briefly interrupted in 1910 by the arrival of the Portuguese Republic and the end of the monarchy) segues into Sara's sad story and eventually becomes João's. Circumstances turn João into an unwitting labor leader, or at least he is mistaken for one; his support of a strike becomes the defining event of his life. The meandering story eventually introduces João's son António, who is drafted into the army despite his illiteracy, his daughter Gracinda, who wants to marry João's friend despite her poverty, and his granddaughter Maria, who shares his blue eyes. In 1974, the Carnation Revolution overthrows Portugal's dictatorship, an event that brings the living and dead together in celebration, a fitting end to a powerful story.

The novel's run-on sentences, assembled from words seemingly poured from buckets, flow with a rhythm that is uniquely Saramago's. Dialog is buried haphazardly in the text, always in keeping with the rhythm of the narrative, never set off by quotation marks, and while it's usually easy to understand who is speaking, some readers will be put off by the unconventional style. Although the narrator's identity is neither clear nor consistent, the narrator's chatty editorial voice is always present. As if conversing with a friend, the narrator will mention a town and say "you probably know the place." The narrator sometimes professes not to understand the mysteries of life that he is relating, sometimes says "let's see how things turn out." He gives the reader information that, he says, won't contribute to an understanding of the story, but will let us "know each other better, as the gospels urge us to do." He reminds us that "the seemingly unimportant and the seemingly important form part of the same narrative," and all of it, taken together, is "as good a way as any to explain the latifundio." He suggests that people who might take a different view of the latifundio "clearly don't know much about life." All of this is vintage Saramago: tongue-in-cheek, playful commentary masking profound wisdom shaped by boundless compassion.

Compassionate wisdom is abundant in this haunting story. Saramago reveals the dignity and tribulations of the working poor and the indifferent cruelty of those who exploit them. He explores poverty and charity and the great equalizing force of death. He bemoans wars that tax and kill the poor while benefitting the rich. He ridicules the labeling of striking farm workers as terrorists and exposes the true terrorists: the government agents who have the power to brand those who speak for the powerless as "dangerous elements." He describes the torture of a man from the standpoint of an ant that, unlike the torturers, has a conscience. He lampoons priests who pray for the landowners and lecture the poor. Most importantly, amidst all the agony and suffering that his novel documents, he wryly acknowledges that "life has its good points too." Travel and beauty and sex and birth bring joy and renewal, even if only for a moment. Yet if "each day brings some hope with its sorrow ... then the sorrow will never end and the hope will only ever be just that and nothing more."

Saramago's matter-of-fact presentation of the absurd is filled with deadpan wit and goofy digressions. He treats the reader to hilarious descriptions of peasantry sex ("they huff and puff, they're not exactly subtle"), a political rally ("Where do I go to take a piss?"), middle age ("if this is the prime of life, then allow me to weep"), and the revolution ("what kind of name is junta for a government, there must be some mistake"). António's tall hunting stories, including his technique for catching a hare with pepper and a newspaper, are reason enough to read the book. Yet even the funniest stories are in some sense allegorical. They illuminate life in the latifundio, which isn't much different for rabbits and men.

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Cain by José Saramago

First published in Portuguese in 2009; published in translation by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on October 4, 2011

There is little need to summarize the plot of Cain because anyone with a passing knowledge of Genesis is familiar with much of it, although perhaps not with José Saramago's twisted (and infinitely more entertaining) version. Saramago imparts all sorts of useful information omitted from the original, including why people have navels and how the battle of the sexes began. We do learn more about Cain's life after the death of Abel than Genesis explains, including Cain's affair with Lilith, his intervention in Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, and his visits to Sodom, Jericho, and the Tower of Babel. Cain becomes a sort of time traveler, bouncing from bible story to bible story and witnessing the obvious truth that god "can't bear to see anyone happy" before concluding that "The history of mankind is the history of misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him."

Some readers might be put off by Saramago's unconventional writing style -- the absence of normal punctuation and capitalization -- but those who stick with it will find it easy to adapt. It's a quirky style that befits a quirky book. Cain's various conversations are nothing short of hilarious; punctuation would only get in the way of the rapid-fire exchanges.

Readers who don't appreciate irreverent humor might want to avoid this book. This is literature, not a guidebook to -- or a serious retelling of -- Genesis. Saramago's humor derives from the wicked application of common sense to familiar biblical lore, a technique that had me laughing from the first page, but one that might offend the more devout. In this version of biblical history, characters feel entitled to talk back to a capricious creator who deserves a good scolding. The god of this novel sometimes agrees that he's fallible, but doesn't want others to know of his faults. God knows he can't stop the sun but wants Joshua to pretend he did; angels show up late (a mechanical defect in the left wing throws one off course); the easiest way to deal with Satan is to throw him an occasional victim.

For those readers who have difficulty reconciling the notion of a wise and caring god with the petulant deity who turns a woman into a pillar of salt because she's curious, who tests loyalty by asking people to slay their children, who rains fire down upon the innocent, encourages the mass destruction of cities, and floods the earth because he's disappointed with his creation, this is the novel for you. Saramago's Cain is wholly unimpressed with the creator's sense of justice. He argues that the lord's ways aren't just mysterious but abhorrent. Viewed from the standpoint of a mere mortal, his argument makes good sense -- although Cain's moral authority to complain about god's murderous ways is dubious, at best. In the end, both the creator and the creation are deeply flawed.  Those flaws make for a wonderfully funny novel.

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