Saramago after the Nobel: Contemporary Readings of José Saramago’s Late Works ed. by Paulo de Medeiros and José N. Ornelas (review)

Reviewed by: Saramago after the Nobel: Contemporary Readings of José Saramago's Late Works ed. by Paulo de Medeiros and José N. Ornelas Carlos Garrido Castellano Saramago after the Nobel: Contemporary Readings of José Saramago's Late Works. Ed. by Paulo de Medeiros and José N. Ornelas. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2022. viii+280 pp. €53. ISBN 978–1–78707–894–9. This collection delivers much more than its title promises. Rather than mapping the fertile production that José Saramago—an example of a socially committed cultural producer, intellectual, and activist and to this date the only recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature writing in Portuguese—developed up to the last moments of his life, the volume is concerned with reading Saramago nowadays, as our contemporary. The challenge, so the editors of this volume argue, is to see and think (with) Saramago in the light of the profound transformations that have marked the last decades. The year 1998 was a landmark moment in Portugal and the Portuguese-speaking world, a year indissolubly linked to the recognition of Saramago's œuvre, but also to the Lisbon Universal Exhibition and to a profound questioning of the historical and colonial ties bringing together the territories that have Portuguese as their official language. Published in 2022, in another crucial year that marked the centenary of Saramago's birth, this volume moves away from the celebratory and commemorative to critically problematize the 'after' that constitutes Saramago's late creative production. In a short but focused Introduction, Paulo de Medeiros and José N. Ornelas posit Saramago's work as 'above all emancipatory' (p. 6), and find in the writer from Azinhaga a clear example of how a solid activist position can resist neoliberal cultural appropriation and the global marketization of literature. When it comes to assessing Saramago, the book chooses to remain inconclusive, and this decision is one of its strongest points. Saramago after the Nobel does not force a kind of party discipline on crucial matters concerning Saramago's role in the global circulation of literature; his relationship with Portugalidade and Portuguese cultural institutions; and the writer's capacity to generate a transoceanic cultural network reaching within and beyond the Portuguese-speaking world. Instead, the volume lets the reader meander around a set of chapters written from diverse, even contradictory, perspectives. What brings all the chapters together is an acknowledgement of Saramago's productive and generous humility, of the writer's advocacy of a material and mundane—yet heavily human—capacity for orientation. The collection's critical appraisal of Saramago's late work is here not [End Page 421] at odds with a serene recognition and celebration of this attitude, whose difficulty and inherent value are increased if we consider that Saramago's final years were marked by a sense of the acceleration of the systemic crisis—political, financial, ecological—in which we still find ourselves. Saramago after the Nobel offers a much-needed materialist approach to the critical appreciation of perhaps the most 'earth-driven' of Nobel prizewinners, but also a realization of the weight that this crisis—felt within and beyond the safeguarded space of privilege that World Literature can be—provoked in socially committed public figures such as Saramago. This becomes clear in the chapters by Mark Sabine and de Medeiros. While the former addresses the socio-political relevance of 'the post-Nobel Saramago', the latter highlights the relevance of his writing for a materialist, world-systemic approach to literary and cultural production. Both agree, in any case, on the fact that Saramago's fertile work was never conceived for clear-cut temporal divisions. A similar approach is adopted in the following contributions, which engage with key issues in Saramaguian creativity. Religion is explored by Ornelas and Manuel Frias Martins in relation to The Gospel according to Jesus Christ and Cain. For their part, Carlos Nogueira, Estela Vieira, Sandra Ferreira, Aline Ferreira, and Hania A. M. Nashef engage with philosophical questions and explore the sense of more-than-human solidarity and hopefulness that permeated even Saramago's dystopian fiction. Death is central to the book's final set of chapters (by Orlando Grossegesse, Adriana Martins, Ana Clara Medeiros...