The Notebook

The Notebook, by José Saramago, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Daniel Hahn, Verso £12.99, 256 pages, FT Bookshop price: £10.39

The Notebook is a compilation of the postings by Portuguese novelist-turned-blogger José Saramago. Its appearance proves that texts generated for electronic media are not necessarily antithetical to traditional forms of publishing.

Encouraged by his wife, the author of Blindness kept a web-log from September 2008 until August 2009. This space on “the infinite page of the internet” gave the prolific author yet another medium to air his views on subjects ranging from the minutiae of translation to the author’s misadventures in car repairs. A reluctant blogger at first, he discovered the web could be “that place where I can most express myself according to my desires”.

The Nobel laureate’s thoughts make for intermittently stimulating, if predictable, reading. A militant communist, Saramago’s views on the current financial crisis (“a crime against humanity”) are about as surprising as his views on Catholic bishops (“parasites on civil society”). Admiration for his heroes – they include Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón and former Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio – runs as deep as disgust with his chosen villains, such as George Bush (“the high priest of all liars”) and Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi (“this thing, this disease, this virus that threatens moral death to the land of Verdi”).

Some of the most stirring pieces are old newspaper articles, dug up and reused on the blog. Among them is “Recipe for Killing a Man”, written in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King. But Saramago is most appealing when at his least political. His tributes to fellow writers, from old-timers such as Uruguay’s Mario Benedetti to newcomers such as Portugal’s Gonçalo M Tavares, are filled with affection. Most poignant is Saramago’s recollection, in the entry for December 23 2008, of the night, a year earlier, when he almost died of complete organ failure.

Published in book form, Saramago’s musings are likely to reach a readership that might not have been able, or inclined, to follow them online. Though they have been available to readers of Portuguese and Spanish on the Nobel laureate’s official web page since 2008, Amanda Hopkinson and Daniel Hahn’s fine translation finally brings them to English-language readers.

Yet The Notebook is prey to some of the vices of electronic media. Immediacy does not encourage accuracy, and Saramago occasionally gets his facts wrong, such as the name of black activist Rosa Parks. (To his credit, he is not above apologising for mistakes later.) More significantly, jottings that were once newsworthy, including those about the exhumation of the body of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, have been falsified by subsequent events.

Reading The Notebook from cover to cover can feel like perusing an extended and strident op-ed page. It can induce rage-fatigue even among Saramago enthusiasts. But blogs are not designed to be read from beginning to end. It is best dipped into at intervals, so readers can savour it for what it really is: a provocative miscellany of occasional pieces.