06 Mar 2012 10:32:33
It has taken almost 60 years, but a novel that the late Nobel laureate José Saramago submitted to a publisher in 1953 has finally been released.
Saramago, best known for his 1995 novel Blindness, won the Nobel in 1998 for what judges described as his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony". But 45 years earlier, when the 31-year-old author sent the manuscript for Claraboya (Skylight) to a Portuguese publisher, he never heard back.
Saramago was in his fifties before he broke through as a writer with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda in 1982, with a 1988 English translation bringing him to an international audience. It took until 1989 for the publisher to get in touch with the author about Claraboya, telling him they had found the manuscript during a move and would like to publish it. But he refused.
"Saramago suffered a great deal because of this snub. He felt that if someone hands you the fruits of their labour, the least you can do is reply," his widow Pilar del Rio told press in Madrid as the novel was published. Saramago, who died in 2010 aged 87, did not write another novel for almost 20 years after Claraboya was overlooked, she said, focusing instead on journalism.
"He called it the book that was lost and found in time," del Rio said. "He told us he did not want it published during his lifetime but that those who were left behind after he died could do what they thought best with it. We all knew, I think Saramago as well, that it would be best to publish it."
Claraboya tells of the inhabitants of an apartment block in Lisbon: the shoemaker Silvestre, Justina and her brutal husband, and the nostalgic Spanish woman Carmen. "It was a difficult novel for the era. It is a book where the family, which is the pillar of society, is a bit of a nest of vipers. There is rape, lesbian love, abuse. Could Portuguese society handle this in the 50s? I don't think so," said del Rio. "My guess is the publishing house was holding on to it until better times, but at the time nobody thought Salazar's regime would last so long."
The novel has now been published in Portugal, Spain and Latin America. Saramago's UK publisher Random House said now the novel has been released in Spanish it will consider an English translation.
Another previously unpublished early novel by the author, Raised from the Ground, is due this summer in the UK. Written in 1980, the book is the novel in which Saramago "first found his distinctive voice and style", said Random House, telling of the lives of the Mau-Tempo (literally, Badweather) family through the first and second world wars. "Highly political yet full of Saramago's characteristic humour and humanity, this is a novel as full of love as it is of pain," said the publisher. "It is a vivid, moving tribute to the men and women among whom Saramago lived as a child, and a fascinating insight into the early work of this literary giant."
