‘Raised From the Ground,’ by José Saramago
It might seem surprising that only now —
14 years after José Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature and two years
after his death — is this major novel, first published in Portugal in 1980,
appearing in English translation. Then again, politically radical fiction is
often a tough sell in our market. While Saramago was an outspoken member of his
country’s Communist Party (“Marx was never so right as now,” he remarked at the
outset of the recent global financial crisis), in his best-known work his
politics are embedded in allegory or fantasy, allowing readers to view them as
loosely humanist or to overlook them entirely. Not so with “Raised From the
Ground.” Still, what’s apt to strike readers of this book is not so much that
it’s radical but that it’s topical. “What kind of world,” it asks, “divides
into those who make a profession of idleness and those who want work but can’t
get it”? The novel even ends with descriptions of a kind of Occupy movement —
though one with higher stakes — as peasants take over farm estates whose owners
have relocated rather than pay their workers a living wage.
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