Skylight by José Saramago, trans by Margaret Jull Costa (Harvill Secker, £16.99)
The Portuguese novelist José Saramago published his first book in 1947, setting him on a path that was to lead, 51 years later, to the Nobel Prize in Literature. When he died in 2010 he was his country’s literary éminence grise and 20,000 people attended his funeral. His ascent was, however, far from smooth; success as a writer did not come until his sixties and between his first and second books there was a 20-year gap — or so it seemed.
In fact, in 1953 Saramago had sent a novel to his publisher and that was the last he saw or heard of it.
In 1989, however, he received a telephone call while shaving saying that the manuscript had been rediscovered and, at last, the publishers were keen to see it into print. Saramago, who had been profoundly bruised by the silence that followed his submission, refused. He collected the typescript and buried it beneath a pile of papers of his own, adamant that this symbol of corporate rudeness and personal rejection would never be published in his lifetime. So it wasn’t until 2011 that the book finally appeared (in Portugal and Brazil), and now it is published for the first time in English, 61 years after he finished writing it.
Skylight, “the book lost and found in time”, as the author referred to it, is therefore both the latest novel by a venerated writer and an apprentice piece by someone still establishing his themes and tone. The book details the lives of the inhabitants of an apartment block in late-1940s Lisbon. It is a warren of jealousies, of hopes abandoned and sustained, of mourning and love, of indifference and routine. On its three floors live a family of four spinsters fallen on hard times; two ill-matched couples precariously held together — one by their dead daughter, the other by their living son; a kept woman whose sponsor (there is no love there) visits three times a week; a husband and wife dominated by their knowing daughter; and an elderly cobbler and his wife who take in a young lodger.
These melancholy lives play out as though through the verses of fado, the mournful Portuguese songs of resignation. Not all of Saramago’s characters, however, are resigned:the apartment block is full of broiling sexual frustration and a raging against fate. These urges break out in bitterness and shocking episodes of marital rape or incest that perhaps help explain why, in the Portugal of Salazar, the publishers quietly forgot about the book. There are, though, moments of great poignancy and tenderness: a father pouring out his soul to his uncomprehending seven-year-old son or the friendship that develops over games of draughts between the philosophical cobbler and his young lodger — about the same age as Saramago when he wrote the book — who has yet to find a role in life.
Although the book is pessimistic — the family is not the ideal bond, love is in short supply, living with other people is hard — Skylight is a deeply affecting novel, the work of an already adroit writer who marshals his characters with assurance, opening up their apartments like a doll’s house to reveal the lives inside. One can only wonder what other novels he might have written had his publisher had the courtesy to acknowledge receipt of the manuscript and offer the anxious young author a word or two of encouragement.
Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p
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