The Notebook by Jose Saramago

  

What do you do when you have won the Nobel Prize for Literature and your books are read and celebrated all over the globe at the beginning of the new millennium?  Why, keep a blog of course!  And this is exactly what Jose Saramago in his book ‘The Notebook’ does.  It’s a relatively new medium and as a blogger myself I find it useful for convey information and ideas to an audience with virtually no cost but there are problems for the ordinary person turned blog writer:  they may not write anything of either interest or use.  Enter Saramago who as an experienced writer raises the level of blogging from doggerel to Literature, sometimes with a capital L.  He is a wonderful example to us all who wish to write for the Internet.  Of course he does not need a blog but he does this after being asked by one of his friends to keep one and it helps that he has plenty to say and never seems to run out of things to say.

  What Saramago has to say is usually about politics, including recent events such as the 2008 financial crash, the rise Barak Obarma and other things.  In this regard he is not ambivalent, he is of the communist ilk and his opinions are regularly come from the Left side of the political spectrum.  Literary tributes are also the order of the day as he respects those who have passed away and those who have achieved awards.  And occasionally he plugs a new book but he is very tactful about this.

  The posts, or, if you are old fashioned, entries, are short and do not go into much depth.  While this would be a weakness in other columns here it works to be fed bite-sized chunks of comment as he usually returns to his subject later on.  Reading Saramago is much like reading a secular book of devotions from a literary saint giving food for thought more or less everyday and though in long sessions he may become tiresome with his, in the end, predictable view on politicians he is delightful if taken in small portions. 

  Interestingly he does have some more descriptive pieces that might be a work-in-progress or simply an exercise in writing.  I found that these were a good antidote to the relentlessly political speculations that are good if you have an appetite for politics but not so much if you want to know how a writer of his stature goes about the business of writing.  For as much as he talks about that subject he may very well know as much as us, which is both a comfort and a question.

  It gives hope to the blog-turned-book that they do not all have to be about the minutiae of everyday life nor all out rants against the world.  They can be about the cultivation of the intellect and the compassion for culture.  But what Saramago displays best in this book is his imagination, which he carries in spades, and this is probably what has made him one of the best writers, not only in his own country, but in the whole world.  Now that he has passed it will be sad not to have more books like Seeing, Blindness and The Double but he has left us with an impressive legacy for us to explore at our pleasure, and, occasionally, our edification.