José Saramago: Los Angeles Times

A Memoir - "Small Memories" in the Los Angeles Times

"Sometimes I wonder if certain memories are really mine or if they're just someone else's memories of episodes in which I was merely an unwitting actor and which I found out about later when they were told to me by others." Who hasn't felt this way? Wondered whether a memory came from a photograph or a story or an actual event?

José Saramago, driven by longing for the village in which he was born but also for a self he fears he has lost, goes painstakingly back over his early memories. Sometimes he writes in the third person, sometimes the first. Some events are more vivid than others — pinned in the consciousness of his long life by pain or beauty or the intensity of the senses.

Los Angeles Times