Portuguese Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago's "Small Memories" of when He was Small

José de Sousa Saramago (1922-2010) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. He was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometers north-east of Lisbon. The family moved to Lisbon when the boy was eighteen months old, but he continued to spend summers in the village with his maternal grandparents. small memories recalls his memories from when he was small in small chunks of limited interest, at least to someone like me who has read none of his novels but is curious about coming of age in Iberia of the 1930s.

The best bit IMHO is about how the derogatory nickname "saramango" (wild radish, the leaves of which poor people ate) was inscribed on his birth certificate. Having a different last name than his (by-then policeman) father introduced doubts about paternity when the child began school, and his father, by then a policeman, added the name, providing a rare instance in which the father took on the name of the son.

After primary school success, the boy trained in a technical school to become a mechanic. His two years of work in an auto repair shop are beyond the childhood memoir, as are his years working at a metal company, not becoming a writer (poet, translator, critic, and eventually novelist) until 1966.

The vignettes in (first published in Portuguese in 2007 as Pequenas Memórisas ) invoke childhood terrors (of dogs, of phantasms of the night), fights, the lack of books available to the future writer, his early vigorous libido, his early atheism, and the death of his older brother Francisco (1920-24) shortly after the family's move to Lisbon. Formative as that death seems to have been, the memories are mostly wry. Despite mentions of the Spanish Civil War, the memoirs are apolitical. Saramango was critical of globalization, but in his memoirs accepts that the things, including buildings and ancient olive groves, that he knew as a child no longer exist.

The future communist did not wallow in invoking rural poverty. The most telling specific for me was that his mother pawned the family's blankets each spring, and redeemed them before winter. Alas, he does not explain how his mother accumulated the money for the pawnbrokers' profits during the summer. Similarly, he notes that he did not like the silent-film comedies of Harold Lloyd. This stray note would have been more interesting had Saramango deigned to provide even a sentence about why not. (I realize that his writing is not famous for its reader-friendliness...)

The text includes some run-on sentences and paragraphs running for pages, but no allegory or magic realism, as the aged author specifies what he is not sure about in what he remembers. The miscellaneous memories in a book that is far from linear do not seem to have been edited. That is, rather than changing earlier text when more information became available, Saramango added clarifications later in the book('s composition).

There are breaks and punctuation, but no subheadings or division into chapters. The slight volume concludes with some wryly captioned family photos showing the future writer as an adorable child.