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REMEMBERING JOSÉ SARAMAGO

Tucked away at the very end of The Economist, just before the classified ads and charts on weekly indicators, is reliably the best part of the paper: the obituary. This week the space is dedicated to José Saramago, Portugal’s Nobel laureate in literature, who died on June 18th, aged 87. Witness the use of language, a fitting tribute to the stylish prose of the man himself:

The epiphany occurred some time in the late 1970s, when José Saramago, tall, spare, ascetic, professorial in bearing though in fact self-taught, already in his mid-50s but not yet known, realised that the book he was writing would never take wing unless he wrote it as if he spoke it. He began, then, as he laboured over his tale of the daily grind of peasants in the vast burning plains of Portugal’s Alentejo, digging into the dry stones and gravel until their arms bled like Christ’s on the cross, to tell the story orally, marking punctuation almost wholly with commas because that was how words came out of mouths, flowing along inexorably like making music, often for pages at a time.

Punctuation, he said, was like traffic signs, too much of it distracted you from the road on which you travelled, and if you wondered, Wouldn’t writing be rather confusing without it, he would say No, it was like the constant wash and turn of the sea, sounding even more sibilant in Portuguese than in English, or like a journey taken by a traveller, every step linked to the next and every end to a beginning, or like the press of time, no sooner coming than going, never stopping in the present, which consequently never existed.