A Brilliant Fable is Never a Foible

"The Tale of the Unknown Island"
Jose Saramago
Harcourt Brace
1998 (English ed. 1999)
Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa 

This tiny book, just 51 pages, many of them one-sided, is a quick read. I picked it up at the library, started reading it while I was waiting on my kids to get out of school, and was done before the teenager finally slid into the backseat. Even factoring in the irritating retrograde of 'teen time,' that's not very long. You could finish this book on the train on your way to work. You could finish it in the tub.

I think it's important to talk about the length of the book because a lot of people might dismiss something so small thinking it can't possibly tell enough story--which is silly. And of course you and I would never be so pedantic that we'd dismiss a book because we could easily mistake it for a deck of cards. Only pathetic snobs do that. We're elite snobs.

Jose Saramago is new for me. I've never read his famous books, such as, "The Stone Raft," or "Blindness," so perhaps I am at a disadvantage in reading "Unknown Island" without having sampled his literary corpus. So if I say something any first year literary major ought to be able to rattle off in his sleep regarding our wordy Portuguean, please feel free to fire off a poisonous DUH.

First of all, it's really a short story published as a hardback. As a short story, it strays off the well-worn road and nearly crashes headlong into G.G. Marquez’s delicious fable about a storm wounded angel, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." Saramago's story, like Marquez's, is a fable, a fairy tale for grown ups.

Saramago's story reads as if it is being told, not being written, and as much as trigger happy literary labelists will stamp it ALLEGORY, I don't buy it. Nowhere in the book does Saramago employ rhetoric. His tale is exactly that: a tale. His King is a glyph of royalty. He is a living breathing character, sure, but he’s stock. He doesn’t preach or persecute. He just says his lines. They’re interesting lines but they serve the politics of the story.

This is not author as teacher; it is author as vessel, which is softer and more fun. But, even as a fable, "Island" runs up against allegory and I'm sure somewhere in some university some august gentleman with more harrumphs in his diction than a spastic British librarian is passionately debating this very point, but that's about as far as I'm willing to take it. I calls 'em like I sees 'em and it's a folksy, whimsical story with more meaning than the words, by themselves, convey.

Mr. Saramago employs a device I haven't seen in a long time and I think this, again, is what gives the book such a storyteller's mouth. Instead of separating dialogue with quotation marks he puts it all into the same sentence. It's breathless and quick, like a nine-year-old kid. It brightens the pace and gives the story a sudden sparkle I wasn't expecting. The story is certainly crisp enough and if there's a word wasted it isn't in the text. Maybe the title page is a little verbose, I don't know. That whole paragraph about "translated from Portuguese by M. J. Costa," seemed to run on.

I suspect Saramago's comes through in this book. I say that never having heard the man speak. I assume, from the writing, that he's a thousand years old and speaks Portuguese with a 3rd century Latin accent, but I might be wrong. I could pause right now and Google it but honestly, facts don't matter in this matter: in “Island,” the narrator's voice is a grandfather's voice, burnished soft brown, like an old leather chair, as crackly as a low fire. I imagine it's a voice pregnant with horse sense and history, the kind Hollywood ad execs would pay ten gazillion dollars an hour to read their copy because no one can resist it. The man could sell you your own dog if he felt like it. The voice pokes out of the page when you're not paying attention and you can almost hear him telling you the story and there, right there when that happens, when Granddaddy Saramago's hearth fire voice starts reading the story in your head and your own voice disappears way in the back to have a Scotch, this is where you realize you are hopelessly enchanted by a master storyteller. Saramago has achieved what every writer would sell his mother’s soul for: the ability to stand in the mind of the reader, alive and in control.

I'm deciding not to tell the story’s story. The book takes 22 minutes to read. Suffer the wait. I will tell you this much. It starts with these words:
"A man went to knock at the King's door and said, give me a boat."

I will also reveal, with a flippant flop of my snobbish hand, that this is a love story. I repeat: THIS IS A LOVE STORY. Because you won't believe me until the end and then you will and even after having read this, Saramago's spectral presence in your head will have erased the idea from your mind and you'll have the same sudden grin on your face I did when I realized just what a magician Saramago really is.

Finally, Saramago's book really smacks other authors in their page counting asses. Here is the other ultimate work of the writer masterfully revealed. "Island" is told with a ferocious economy of words, with the manic Zen precision of a watchmaker. Even the punctuation is reduced to its bones. It’s a Minum Opus. Yet, instead of a brittle, fey, 'modern' story, which is difficult to read and beautiful only because it says so, Saramago's brilliant reduction is like a delicious soup stock--he let it simmer all day and you take one sip and something happens in your mouth you can't explain and all the tastes of all the component parts seem at once perfectly clear and distinct yet all they're melted together and they just . . . taste . . . perfect.
.:[G]:.