As 7 Vidas de José Saramago by Miguel Real and Filomena Oliveira (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: As 7 Vidas de José Saramago by Miguel Real and Filomena Oliveira David G. Frier Miguel Real and Filomena Oliveira, As 7 Vidas de José Saramago (Lisbon: Companhia das Letras, 2022). 747 pages. Print and ebook. This biography of Portugal’s Nobel Laureate in Literature has been researched in depth and compiled by two specialists who have engaged closely with his work in the past: Real is a long-standing literary critic, who has published widely on Saramago and other major Portuguese authors, while Oliveira’s activities as a theatre director have included adaptations of a number of Saramago’s major novels. They have therefore been able to achieve access to the author and those close to him over many years, and this fact is reflected in the extensive length and broad scope of this study. The central tenet of the work is a focus on the author’s lifelong (and ultimately successful) dedication to the creation of ‘Josephville’, a concept derived from a lesser-known chronicle by Saramago originally published in the regional newspaper O Jornal do Fundão in the late 1960s (over a decade before his first major literary success, achieved in 1980 with Levantado do Chão), where he contrasted his ideal city of letters with the real-life experiences of a would-be writer in a conservative and culturally elitist Lisbon, hostile to a working-class, rural, self-taught intellectual such as himself. This concept of Saramago’s ambition to construct his own ‘Josephville’ then becomes a rather strained conceit sustained throughout the book, justifying the notion of the ‘seven lives’ or seven major stages in Saramago’s life and work from his origins in a village in the Ribatejo through to celebrity status, unprecedented for a literary author in Portugal, as a major figure in world literature and a commentator on a wide range of social and political issues. The authors view Saramago’s entire career as a process of ascent to this stage, forming the overriding priority of both his personal life and his literary creation, which have to be viewed in parallel. This general framework for reading Saramago’s trajectory is unproblematic: Joaquim Vieira’s earlier biography of the author (published in 2018) made a similar argument. The major difference between that work and the present volume, however, is that, whereas Vieira sought out a wide range of perspectives of different kinds on Saramago’s life, his professional career and inner self, the authors of this volume seek to reach their conclusions largely through written sources, drawing on an astonishing range of literary and non-literary texts written by the author, including correspondence with many well-known contemporaries and interviews with the press in many countries, as well as the testimonies of those who knew him well, including prominent academics such as Carlos Reis and members of Saramago’s own family. While this approach undoubtedly yields many interesting insights and delves into a number of topics which have not been widely acknowledged (including a long-overdue re-evaluation and cultural contextualization of the author’s role in the notorious [End Page 98] episode of the dismissal of a group of twenty-four journalists from the Diário de Notícias during Saramago’s period as editor of the newspaper, in 1975), it does necessarily reduce the scope for critical distance from the novelist’s own perspectives on his life, career and interactions with others, not least because the authors seem on occasion to rely on Saramago’s own memories as committed to writing, often long after the events outlined. This tendency is noticeable, for example, in the relatively uncritical attention paid to accounts of his early life in the Ribatejo, as recorded in his As Pequenas Memórias (published in 2006). In addition, while this is certainly no hagiographical account, there is not the same degree of examination of more difficult aspects of the author’s character to be found in Vieira’s work (for example, in relation to allegations of infidelity during his relationships with Ilda Reis and Isabel de Nóbrega). Indeed, at times it is not clear at all if the underlying rationale...