Reflections on Jose Saramago

I was scrolling through Instagram this morning when a short advertisement stopped me in my tracks.

Not because I was interested in the product. Quite the opposite.

For a moment I felt as though José Saramago had quietly reached over my shoulder and whispered, “There it is.”

I have read The Cave several times, and each reading leaves me with the same admiration—not only for Saramago’s imagination but for his affection for ordinary Portuguese people. His potter, his family, his neighbors are industrious, stubborn, practical souls. They live by work, by patience, and by the old sayings that have accumulated through generations. Saramago scatters these popular proverbs throughout the novel as though they were another form of wisdom, polished smooth by countless hands.

It is hardly surprising.

Saramago was born in the tiny village of Azinhaga, the son of landless peasants. Even his name tells a story. His family name should have been simply José de Sousa, but a registrar, on his own initiative, added the village nickname Saramago—the name of a wild herb once gathered as food by poor families in difficult times. The mistake remained, and the humble plant became the name by which the world would know one of Portugal’s greatest writers.

Knowing this, one begins to understand the tenderness with which he portrays working people. He never romanticizes them, yet he sees their dignity. He knew their sayings because they were the sayings of his own childhood. He understood their perseverance because it was the perseverance of his own family.

In The Cave, that world is threatened by the immense commercial Center, where life gradually becomes detached from reality. Desire is manufactured. Success is displayed in shop windows. People begin chasing images instead of lives. Saramago once described our age as an audiovisual world, one in which reality is increasingly hidden beneath carefully constructed appearances.

The novel reaches its unforgettable climax when the family discovers, beneath the Center itself, a cavern containing figures chained before a wall, believing the shadows cast upon it to be the whole of reality. Saramago is, of course, echoing Plato’s famous allegory, but he gives it new urgency. The cave is no longer an ancient philosophical thought experiment. It is beneath the very place where modern society shops, consumes, and entertains itself.

That image has stayed with me for years.

Perhaps that is why a simple Instagram advertisement brought the novel flooding back. It was not the advertisement itself that mattered. It was the feeling that I was once again being invited to mistake appearance for reality, to pursue another carefully polished promise.

The great courage of Saramago’s characters is not that they destroy the Center. They simply refuse to remain inside it. They choose the uncertain freedom of real life over the comfortable illusion of shadows.

Saramago understood the cost of following one’s convictions. When The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was prevented by the Portuguese government from being considered for a major European literary prize, he left Portugal and settled on the island of Lanzarote. Yet he never ceased being profoundly Portuguese. His imagination, his language, and above all his affection for ordinary people remained rooted in the country that had formed him.

Years after his death, his ashes were returned to Lisbon and buried beneath a 109-year-old olive tree outside the Fundação José Saramago. The tree itself had been brought from Azinhaga, the village where his life began. I cannot imagine a more fitting resting place for a man who never forgot the earth, the people, and the quiet dignity from which he came.

That final image seems to answer the novel itself. In a world increasingly captivated by dazzling shadows, Saramago returned, at last, to something real: an ancient tree, simple soil, and the village that had first taught him how to see.
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The olive tree outside the Fundação José Saramago, Lisbon. Beneath it rest the ashes of José Saramago. The tree was brought from his birthplace, Azinhaga.