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Summary
Summary
A multigenerational family saga that paints a sweeping portrait of twentieth-century Portugal
First published in 1980, the City of Lisbon Prize-winning Raised from the Ground follows the changing fortunes of the Mau Tempo family--poor landless peasants not unlike Saramago's own grandparents. Set in Alentejo, a southern province of Portugal known for its vast agricultural estates, the novel charts the lives of the Mau Tempos as national and international events rumble on in the background--the coming of the republic in Portugual, the two World Wars, and an attempt on the dictator Salazar's life. Yet nothing really impinges on the grim reality of the farm laborers' lives until the first communist stirrings.
Finally available in English, Raised from the Ground is Saramago's most deeply personal novel, the book in which he found the signature style and voice that distinguishes all of his brilliant work.
Author Notes
José Saramago was born on November 16, 1922. He spent most of his childhood on his parent's farm, except while attending school in Lisbon. Before devoting himself exclusively to writing novels in 1976, he worked as a draftsman, a publisher's reader, an editor, translator, and political commentator for Diario de Lisboa.
He is indisputably Portugal's best-known literary figure and his books have been translated into more than 25 languages. Although he wrote his first novel in 1947, he waited some 35 years before winning critical acclaim for work such as the Memorial do Convento. His works include The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Stone Raft, Baltasar and Blimunda, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and Blindness.
At age 75, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 for his work in which "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony, continually enables us to apprehend an elusory reality." He died from a prolonged illness that caused multiple organ failure on June 18, 2010 at the age of 87.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
Though Saramago wrote his first novel in 1947 at the age of 24, critics viewing his long career in retrospect have suggested that Raised from the Ground, first published in 1980, was the novel in which Saramago found the distinctive voice that would lead him to literary prominence. Coincidentally or not it is also said to be one of his most personal works. A multigenerational epic set in the vast farmlands of southern Portugal, this story portrays the hardscrabble lives of the Mau Tempo family, defined by never-ending toil set to the harsh rhythms of the agricultural calendar. The bleakness is apparently permanent; world wars and an attempted assassination of dictator Salazar cannot dispel it. Only with the coming of communism and with it the promise of equality and an eight-hour workday might change be possible. Saramago's poetic and political fans of the English-speaking world will unite in appreciation for this long-awaited translation. st1\:*behavior:url(#ieooui) --Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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. In "Raised From the Ground," Saramago braids together 20th-century Portuguese history and the lives of several generations of the fictional Mau-Tempo family (whose name means "bad weather," "the right name for the times we're living through"). The story begins at nightfall on a dirt road in southern Portugal during a heavy storm. Heading for a new home in a new hovel - one they will not occupy for long - are the boozing shoemaker Domingos; his wife, Sara; and their son, João, whose blue eyes derive from a 15thcentury German ancestor who raped a local girl. Saramago's loquacious narrator will repeatedly refer back to this unpunished crime, which comes to symbolize the brutal injustices that have beset the local people for centuries. The main part of the story follows blue-eyed João and his wife, Faustina, as well as their children Antonio and Gracinda and their son-inlaw and granddaughter, as they eke out lives under regimes that are as callous to the peasants as they are amenable to the usual beneficiaries of far-right conservatism: landowners, industrialists, the army and the church. In 1910, when a republic proves no advance on the monarchy, the peasants working the estate where the family lives demand change. During the Salazar dictatorship, socialist agitators begin "roaming the latifundio," and after World War II the local people ask for a minimum daily wage - one that "wouldn't even pay for a filling in one of the boss's teeth." Eventually, João is arrested for striking; within four years he'll be arrested again, with more harrowing consequences. Saramago himself was "raised from the ground" - born and reared in the world he evokes here - and his intimate, particular knowledge of peasant life is one of several reasons the novel transcends propaganda, by a long shot. Others include his gift for lyric realizations of the countryside ("Hidden in the forest of the wheat field, the partridges are listening hard. No sound of men passing, no roaring engine, no tremulous shaking of the ears of wheat as the sickle or the whirlwind of the harvester approach") and his skill at enacting physicality - pleasure, fatigue, hunger or the suffering of a tortured striker who, in the book's unforgettable centerpiece, "sits slumped in the chair like an empty jacket" Then there are the interludes of humor, bracingly bitter or charmingly whimsical - like Antonio Mau-Tempo's prescription for catching literate hares with a newspaper and a pinch of pepper. These welcome remissions recall Primo Levi's insight that when novelists depict atrocities they never experienced themselves, respectfulness or ignorance leads them to banish all humor, while in fact humor is a survivor's indispensable resource. If this novel's vision of entrenched inequalities makes it seem timely, another factor makes it aesthetically essential: By the author's own reckoning it's the book where he found and developed his style. Readers familiar with Saramago's prose - the shifting pronouns, perspectives and tenses; the way dialogue and exposition are wedged together; the long, agglutinative sentences with their chains of spliced clauses, mischievous qualifications and omniscient interjections - will not be surprised by the writing. They will often be delighted: "The pig is not really a suitable animal for nativity scenes, it lacks a sheep's elegance, thick coat, soft woolly caress, pass me my ball of yarn, will you, darling, such creatures are made to bend the knee, whereas the pig rapidly loses its sweet look of a pink, newborn bonbon and becomes instead a bulbous-nosed, malodorous lover of mud." A short sample can't really suggest the spell this prose casts and compounds over hundreds of pages, or how, days after you've set the book down, its cadences go on looping through your mind like an odd, addictive music. There are some bathetic lapses. Comparing animals and people, Saramago crowds two trite observations into a single sentence: "The lives of human beings are far more complicated, for we are, after all, human." The epithet "poor thing" is repeated to the point where you start to wait for it, like a tic And the author's verbal playfulness can wax too fanciful: "An ill wind of insurrection was blowing through the latifundio, the snarling of a cornered, starving wolf that could cause great damage if it should turn into an army of teeth." Worse, an early scene where strikers face scab laborers seems mechanically explanatory, like a dramatization for students at a Soviet youth camp: "Those from the north say, We're hungry. Those from the south say, So are we, but we refuse to accept this poverty, if you agree to work for such a low wage, we'll be left with nothing." But such cavils fade in the heat of this book's sustained vitality, narrative sweep and earned indignation. Like Antonio the hare-catcher, Saramago is "a great teller of tales about things he has either seen or invented, experienced or imagined," and possesses "the supreme art of being able to blur the frontiers between the two." Luckily, Margaret Jull Costa has shown congruent skill in bringing his work across that other key frontier, the one between languages. Her concise footnotes help the reader unpack Portuguese literary references and wordplay, while also supplying necessary historical background. Her efforts have lent us access, at last, to a great writer's first major work, a novel that resounds with relevance for our own time. Saramago himself was 'raised from the ground,' born in the world of landless peasants he evokes here. Steven Heighton's books include the novel "Afterlands" and a collection of essays on writing and creativity, "Workbook."
Kirkus Review
An early, epic novel by the late Nobel Prize winner, for completists steeped in knowledge of the author's work and his native Portugal. Though this novel won the City of Lisbon Prize upon publication in 1980 and has since been praised as both seminal stylistically and deeply personal, this translation represents its first publication in English, more than three decades later. And even fans of the fables and parables of Saramago (Blindness, 1998, etc.) will likely find the novel a mixed bag, with flashes of brilliance offset by stretches of tedium, amid oblique references to Portuguese politics and culture that brief footnotes can barely illuminate. The novel encompasses three generations of the agrarian peasant Mau Tempo family, treated little better than cattle by the landowners who employ them. "These men and women were born to work, like good to average livestock," writes the author, whose own family origins were similar. At times, the narrative slips into first-person from different characters, at other times, it offers the perspective of an ant, and yet other times, the distinction between the ant's view and a human's might be obliterated. Similarly, the authorial presence is very much in evidence throughout, with a droll tone, though the lack of any progress over the course of decades and generations seems tragic. "[W]e're so used to laughter turning into tears or a howl of rage so loud it could be heard in heaven, not that there is any heaven," he writes, of a conspiratorial exploitation that finds the church and government in league with each other, supporting the status quo, exercising power over the powerless. Even the natural order can't provide solace, since "nature displays remarkable callousness when creating her various creatures." As in the American naturalism of Frank Norris and Stephen Crane more than a century ago, the characters are but cogs in a big, cold machine, born to die but supplying their own replacements before they do. A novel that offers insight into the renowned author and his native land.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Modeled on his own family history, this mid-career novel by Nobel laureate Saramago starts with the prediction that drunken shoemaker Domingos Mau Tempo will end up dangling from a noose of his own making. His son Joao, too young to wield a mattock, is left at the mercy of the latifundio, the system of minimal land-ownership that has plagued Portugal for centuries. Even as it dangles promises of paradise to distract the workers on the feudal estates, the Church largely ignores them in its scramble to fawn upon the landowners. Saramago does not use dates for the events of his novel, but veteran translator Costa provides footnotes that guide readers through the cataclysms of the past century. At length, Joao embraces the communist ideas that begin to percolate through his world, and on a new-risen day, the workers agree to get into trailers and head for the Mantas estate, which they plan to occupy. VERDICT A rich story of serfdom and possible redemption told by a master storyteller. [See Prepub Alert, 6/3/12.]-Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
HERE, IT'S MOSTLY countryside, land. Whatever else may be lacking, land has never been in short supply, indeed its sheer abundance can only be explained by some tireless miracle, because the land clearly predates man, and despite its long, long existence, it has still not expired. That's probably because it's constantly changing: at certain times of the year, the land is green, at others, yellow or brown or black. And in certain places it is red, the color of clay or spilled blood. This, however, depends on what has been planted or what has not yet been planted, or what has sprung up unaided and died simply because it reached its natural end. This is not the case with wheat, which still has some life left in it when it is cut. Nor with the cork oak, which, despite its solemn air, is full of life and cries out when its skin is ripped from it. There is no shortage of color in this landscape, but it isn't simply a matter of color. There are days as harsh as they are cold, and others when you can scarcely breathe for the heat: the world is never content, the day it is will be the day it dies. The world does not lack for smells either, not even here, which is, of course, part of the world and well provided with land. Were some insignificant creature to die in the undergrowth, it would smell of death and putrefaction. Not that anyone would notice if there were no wind, even if they were to pass close by. The bones would be either washed clean by the rain or baked dry by the sun, or not even that if the creature were very small, because the worms and the gravedigger beetles would have come and buried it. This, relatively speaking, is a fair-sized piece of land, and while it begins as undulating hills and a little stream-water, because the water that falls from the skies is just as likely to be feast as famine, farther on it flattens out as smooth as the palm of your hand, although many a hand, by life's decree, tends, with time, to close around the handle of a hoe, sickle or scythe. The land. And like the palm of a hand, it is crisscrossed by lines and paths, its royal or, later, national roads, or those owned by the gentlemen at the town hall, three such roads lie before us now, because three is a poetical, magical, spiritual number, but all the other paths arise from repeated comings and goings, from trails formed by bare or ill-shod feet walking over clods of earth or through undergrowth, stubble or wild flowers, between wall and wasteland. So much land. A man could spend his whole life wandering about here and never find himself, especially if he was born lost. And he won't mind dying when his time comes. He is no rabbit or genet to lie and rot in the sun, but if hunger, cold or heat were to lay him low in some secluded spot, or one of those illnesses that don't even give you time to think, still less cry out for help, sooner or later he would be found. Many have died of war and other plagues, both here and in other parts, and yet the people we see are still alive: some perceive this as an unfathomable mystery, but the real reasons lie in the land, in this vast estate, this latifundio, that rolls from high hills down to the plain below, as far as the eye can see. And if not this land, then some other piece of land, it really doesn't matter as long as we've sorted out what's mine and thine: everything was recorded in the census at the proper time, with boundaries to the north and south and to the east and west, as if this were how it had been ordained since the world began, when everything was simply land, with only a few large beasts and the occasional human being, all of them frightened. It was around that time, and later too, that the future shape of this present land was decided, and by very crooked means indeed, a shape carved out by those who owned the largest and sharpest knives and according to size of knife and quality of blade. For example, those of a king or a duke, or of a duke who then became his royal highness, a bishop or the master of an order, a legitimate son or the delicious fruit of bastardy or concubinage, a stain washed clean and made honorable, or the godfather of a mistress's daughter, and then there's that other high officer of the court with half a kingdom in his grasp, and sometimes it was more a case of, this, dear friends, is my land, take it and populate it to serve me and your offspring, and keep it safe from infidels and other such embarrassments. A magnificent book-of-hours-cum-sacred-accounts-ledger presented at both palace and monastery, prayed to in earthly mansions or in watchtowers, each coin an Our Father, ten coins a Hail Mary, one hundred a Hail Holy Queen, Mary is King. Deep coffers, bottomless silos, granaries the size of ships, vats and casks, coffers, my lady, and all measured in cubits, rods and bushels, in quarts, pottles and tuns, each piece of land according to its use. Thus flowed the rivers and the four seasons of the year, on those one can rely, even when they vary. The vast patience of time and the equally vast patience of money, which, with the exception of man, is the most constant of all measurements, although, like the seasons, it varies. We know, however, that men were bought and sold. Each century had its money, each kingdom its man to buy and sell for maravedis, or for gold and silver marks, reals, doubloons, cruzados, sovereigns or florins from abroad. Fickle, various metal, as airy as the bouquet of a flower or of wine: money rises, that's why it has wings, not in order to fall. Money's rightful place is in a kind of heaven, a lofty place where the saints change their names when they have to, but not the latifundio. A mother with full breasts, fit for large, greedy mouths, a womb, the land shared out between the largest and the large, or, more likely, joining large with larger, through purchase or perhaps through some alliance, or through sly theft, pure crime, the legacy of my grandparents and my good father, God rest their souls. It took centuries to get this far, who can doubt that it will always remain the same? But who are these other people, small and disparate, who came with the land, although their names do not appear in the deeds, dead souls perhaps, or are they still alive? God's wisdom, beloved children, is infinite: there is the land and those who will work it, go forth and multiply. Go forth and multiply me, says the latifundio. But there is another way to speak of all this. Excerpted from Raised from the Ground by José Saramago All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.