TE19 Iberian Adventure

John Hartley

“Our greatest living writer is a staunch communist.” Pedro sipped a beer, “Jose Saramago.”

The maverick novelist had recently made headlines for his criticism of both Church and state. An autodidact, born to illiterate labourers and raised in poverty, Saramago attended school for barely two years. He carved out time at the Galveias Palace library, learnt French and eventually translated Tolstoy, Baudelaire, and Hegel.

“He was a locksmith’s apprentice,” Pedro mused, “It’s almost prophetic.”

‘All the names’ is the story of an archivist in the Ministry of Civil Records who becomes obsessed with tracing the history of a womanwhose records he removes bymistake. But when he tracks her down, she has already died. Parable and myth convergewhen, like Orpheus, he returns to the Ministry’s labyrinth-like achieves to re-file her records, thus rescuing his unknown Eurydice from her bureaucratic ‘death’.

“The man in the machine.”

Another story features a sudden plague of blindness that wrought terror and mass hysteria. The city succumbs to savagery and wholesale cruelty but, when sight is abruptly restored, the survivors are left to confront their own darkness.

“But is humanity hopelessly inclined to darkness?”

Saramago wanders a corridor between blind faith and ardent 178