Customer Reviews

Small Memories

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4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Famed novelist Jose Saramago, in one of his last works, takes us on a dreamy, rambling trip through his memories of childhood and adolescence. He grew up in a small village, but lived for many years in Lisbon as well. He shares with us the rustic atmosphere of his birthplace, his wise but unlettered grandparents, his child's understanding of history, his introduction to letters, his discovery of --girls, and much much else. Some of his memories are tinged with pride, others with eternal embarrassment, shame and guilt. On occasion he treats the reader to a tiny glimpse of his creative process--how some incident or other became the nexus for one of his great novels.

There's no plot, just a collection of poignant little vignettes strung together in no particular order. Fortunately, the author includes punctuation and even quotation marks, unlike in his great novels. The book concludes with some precious family photographs. If you've read any of the great man's works, better yet, if you're a fan of his writing, you won't want to miss out on these few pages of meeting the man himself. I enjoyed Small Memories and recommend it highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Small Memories is certainly something that handles small matters, both in the nature of the memories as well as in the size of the book. I found that in some respects it certainly has some redeemable qualities, but in others I didn't really care for what I was reading.

The cons are that you get zero insight into the adult Saramago. What you get instead are small clipped memories, ending just as quickly as each one began, from his childhood. I couldn't help but wait for that aha moment where he finally turned his childhood into something that would help understand his life better. Instead you are given the insight into the life of a poor family growing up in Portugal. Additionally I couldn't help but be slightly annoyed with his constant reference to "that may not quite be how it happened", "this memory may never have happened at all", to "I might not be remembering that person exactly how it happened". His constant reference to the possibilities that everything he is telling us could be completely false devalues the value of a memoir such as this.

The pros are that you get a nice view into the life and times of the peasant class growing up in a pre World War II time. How he travelled, how he ate, how he lived, how he interacted with other families. It is rather eye opening in that respect, so there is some worth behind a memoir that is nothing more than fragmented memories pieced together that ultimately have little connection with one another. I can't help but be impressed by how he writes and look forward to reading some of his works, but this very small book did little to show me who Saramago was. If you feel you need to purchase this book, certainly wait for the paperback addition since the 100+ pages isn't worth spending the money on a hardback.

2.5 stars.

Although Jose Saramago's memoir of his childhood, SMALL MEMORIES, is short, it contains many moving passages. I had decided that it was basically musings of a great writer-- BLINDNESS is a book I would take on an island--who was in his twilight and that his muse for the most part had left him. Then I came upon his description of his beloved grandfather (and wished I could read Portugese) that is as good as anything I can remember reading: "He is a man like many others on this earth, in this world, perhaps an Einstein crushed beneath a mountain of impossibilities, a philosopher, a great illiterate writer. Something he could never be."

Saramago's remembrance of his grandmother is just as good: "There you were, grandma, sitting on the sill outside your house, open to the vast, starry night, to the sky of which you knew nothing and through which you would never travel, to the silence of the fields and the shadowy trees, and you say, with all the serenity of your ninety years and the fire of an adolescence never lost: `The world is so beautiful, it makes me sad to think I have to die.'"

Poor by the world's standards and from a family of illiterates, Saramago recounts his falling in love with language and literature to become, against all odds, one of the great writers of all time.

SMALL MEMORIES is in short a little treasure.

The name of the author's village is Azinhaga. Its river is the Almonda. The people of the village learned to deal with that river and a more distant one, the Tejo.

The author was a child of the village although the family moved to Lisbon. Azinhaga comes from an Arabic word meaning small path. The olive trees of the region have been replaced by hybrid corn. New olive trees will not reach such a great height as the former ones. A child is in the landscape. Loss of the actual house of the author's maternal grandparents is remedied by memory's reconstructive power.

The young memoir writer feared dogs and loved horses. Saramago was a so-so fisherman and an unskilled hunter. In Lisbon a friend's mother read a serial novel, THE FAIRY OF THE FOREST, to the author and his mother, (the mother remained illiterate and the author became a star pupil at school). The family called Jose Zezito. The family lived in ten homes in ten years.

The writer's grandparents had pigs, a donkey, chickens and rabbits. A rudimentary accounting system was used by his grandmother. Small memories may refer to the shards of memory we experience or it may refer to memories of a youthful existence. In either case the book has elegance and charm.

Fans of Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago may not find enough in this relatively slim volume of memoirs of his early childhood to keep them happy; this isn't the Saramago a reader discovers in his novels, nor does this memoir deal, except indirectly, with the creative process or the ideas that took root and flourished in the latter decades of his life.

That doesn't mean this isn't fascinating -- it just doesn't deal with literary life. Instead, what the reader gets is a (to me) intriguing look at the years that helped shape Saramago, his boyhood moving every year from one apartment to another in Lisbon, while spending summers at the village of his birth with his grandparents and extended family where had been born but that he left as a toddler. There's a chronological structure flow to the broad tale, but within it, Saramago is rambling and discursive, discussing stumbling across a Roman road while driving piglets to market, the death of his elder brother as a young boy, the illiteracy of his mother and grandparents and his playacting the court jester for a wealthy classmate.

What made this a great little book was Saramago's knack for observation -- the way he places his memories in a broader context. For instance, he shares his early fascination with the written word when he describes how he discovered a trunk full of dried beans at his grandparents' farm, and on lifting the lid -- allowing dust to escape that caused painful itching and welts -- to discover newspaper lining the inside of the trunk's lid. Saramago the child ignores the itching to devour every word on the newspaper; the adult looking back 70 years later still can't imagine how such a thing as a newspaper ended up in his grandparents' possession.

Admittedly, I would have enjoyed this even more had Saramago chosen to venture further forward in time and discuss how he conceived and executed his novels, but I acknowledge that that wasn't what the author intended to do. And as is, it's a great glimpse into a world that has slipped into history, that of the Portugal of the 1930s, a far cry from the Portugal of today. Recommended!

Reading books by Saramago can be compared to taking a journey into a magical place. In this rather brief autobiography of his childhood, his prose is like poetry and it transports me into a higher plane. He makes language powerful. The images he creates are so beautiful and picturesque that sometimes I feel as if I am there with him, a child too, sharing the moment. I don't know how he does it, but the complex sentences he composes are magnificently expressive and the punctuation is so perfect, that the lengthy sentences are entirely readable and decipherable.
Through the introduction of a variety of flashbacks, from his early boyhood, he transports us from his grandmother's home (as well as other relatives and acquaintances), to his parent's home, back and forth, affording us a window to look through, offering us a wonderful glimpse of some of the more memorable incidents that shaped his life. Often, I did get confused, as to where I was and how old he was, in a particular reminiscence. The timeline was sometimes confusing and as it began abruptly, almost as if it was in the middle of a thought, it also ended that way. I was left wanting more of his, seemingly random, magical memories. I wanted a wider lens into his background but he only offered a tease, magnificent though it was, of a brief period of time in his life. However, with these small inconsistencies, nothing major is lost and any confusion was worth it because the end result was, as usual, superlative.
The story is told with a touch of subtle humor as well as poignancy. It feels to be a very open and honest appraisal of boyhood events that left their mark on him. It is the story of a youth that was spent discovering the shape of the man, he would then become.
I do have one rather major problem with Saramago. I have heard that some people will not read his books because of his marked anti-Semitism and abhorrent remarks and views about Jews and Israel, and yet, he makes a small point of hinting, in this book, albeit very briefly, in one sentence, about his considered distaste for three men and their policies: Salazar, Hitler and Mussolini. All three are known for repressive policies. Perhaps he felt some small measure of guilt for his past extraordinarily distasteful and hateful comments, regarding Jews and Israel. Perhaps not, but I certainly hope so, because his writing is magnificent and I would hate to see people deprived of his gift because of his misplaced vitriolic, spoken and written words, which come from, for me, his deplorable ideology. The five stars are for his creative gift, not for his unfortunate views.
I received this book as an ARC and will be forever grateful because, regardless of his hatefulness with respect to Israel and the Jewish people, which has spread in his part of the world, perhaps due, in no small measure to his philosophy, his writing is exceptional and with his death, the world has lost a master of words.

This is the first book from the Vine program that wasn't a hit. It initially drew me in with the picturesque writing of his childhood home, and family life, then quickly lost me. It's a very dense book-It seemed that I read, and read some more, only to discover I wasn't half way through the book, but only into it a chapter or two. I love to hear about times past, when life was simpler (in a manner of speaking)- a good friend of mine is a feisty, and fun 79, and I thoroughly enjoy hearing about her childhood, and although this is a slender book, I just couldn't muster up the interest, or energy to finish it. If I should pick it up again, and find it more interesting, I'll definitely update my review.:)

My Story with: When I started getting books from NetGalley I selected two titles; one Pocket Neighborhoods and Small Memories was the second one. I tried reading the latest on three different occasions.

Pages Completed: 32 of 139

Why Never-Ending: It is easy. Mainly because I gave it three chances and was not compelled to continue reading it. I am not saying that the book is bad or that it lacks good structure. In reality, it has too much structure for me. Since the author has a great collection of works I believe this book will turn out better than I can expect.

For me it was like having a conversation about different topics in a short amount of time. Also the writing style was too flourish and literary for my everyday taste. I imagine I could read it if decide to pay unconditional attention to it and take the time to process every situation.

What I like so Far: The way the author describes the looks and smells of his childhood village. He provides a great opportunity for the readers to be transported to a different time and place.

I wanted more: In this case, I wanted less. A more simplistic view of a complicated man's life.

Who should read it: Anyone wanting a great piece of literature by a renamed author.

"Only I knew, without knowing I did, that on the illegible pages of destiny and in the blind meanderings of chance it had been written that I would one day return to Azinhaga to finish being born."

Fitting, perhaps, that this thin, elegantly written memoir its one of the final works of Nobel Prize-wining author Jose Saramago. Wandering from place to place and relative to relative, Saramago recalls here his early years in Portugal - sometimes with crystal clarity and sometimes with the magical haze of a forgotten dream, always with an ear for the poetic and an admirable economy of language.

From fairy tales and learning to read to mud floors and pigsties. From horrific childhood cruelties to inventing the plots of films based only on their posters. From memorable moonlit nights to family gossip. Saramago reaches into his memories and produces for us, his readers, his audience of enthralled children, nugget after nugget - each recognisable from our own lives, each wholly unique to the man telling us the story. And all told with the same sense of whimsical wonder he brought to his novels.

'Small Memories,' like most Saramago books, is not meant to be devoured in a single bite. Its scent should be breathed, its textures felt, its subtle flavors savored. Its words are meant to be sipped rather than gulped, appreciated for the details of a lifetime of observation, and once the glass is empty, remembered for the way they bring to life the wandering memories of an unforgettable individual.

Jose Saramago was the finest of writers, and 'Small Memories' is one of his most memorable vintages.

"We often forget what we would like to remember, and yet certain images, words, flashes, illuminations repeatedly, obsessively return to us from the past at the slightest stimulus, and there's no explanation for that; we don't summon them up, they are simply there."

Jose Saramago's memoir "Small Memories" is exactly what the title indicates -- a patchwork of memories and stories of the author's childhood and youth in Azinhaga and Lisbon, Portugal. It is short -- 139 pages of text and seventeen black and white photos of Saramago and his family.

Saramago maintains good imagery throughout this work; even readers who have never been to Portugal can still see, hear, smell, and feel what he is writing about, from heartwarming victories to dealing with bullies to learning that his mother pawns their blankets every spring for the money.

Either he or the translator, Margaret Jull Costa, maintains the word usage that someone who would be Saramago's age would choose -- sometimes a little formal, but that's how people of Saramago's generation would speak and write. Some words and phrases and, of course, place names are maintained in the Portuguese, but readers with experience in Romance-based languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian) should not have much trouble.

It is indeed a patchwork, though -- there are line breaks, but no chapter breaks at all, and Saramago hops back and forth from incidents in early childhood to incidents in his teen years. It would compare to a grandparent, uncle, or parent sitting down at a family gathering and telling stories of his youth. This can be a little difficult when reading (that's why a solid four stars and not five), but if a reader keeps that feeling in mind, it adds to the natural storyteller skills that Saramago obviously had.