Journey to Portugal - A review

Perhaps the best compliment you can pay to a book is that it connects with a thought or even insecurity you have.

As an avid reader of international literature, I don’t actually have the best track record with Portuguese writers. Elegant Penguin classics from the likes of Peter Schneider and Yukio Mishima have long attracted my attention with their price point and uniform cover designs, and I usually enter a bookshop with half a mind to buy one. Conversely, the purchases of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa and Journey to Portugal by Saramago were as expensive as they were impulsive, with only the former boasting an aesthetically pleasing cover. While I abandoned Pessoa, I persevered with Saramago, and for the reasons outlined below, I am mostly glad I did.

The universal traveller

Saramago should be known to many, especially for Iberian Peninsula dwellers. But even if he is an unknown entity, he helps obfuscate his own self. The primary reason for his trip is to explore Portugal after the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, and the book opens with a memorable scene and some keen insights. As his car straddles the Spain-Portugal border, he invokes the memory of an old saint by preaching to the fish in the river. You may get the impression that he will be a memorable and eccentric guide, but he speaks in the third person throughout. In effect, he is ‘The Traveller’, a man that, in his guise as a Camus reject, becomes universal, often profound and sometimes abstract.

In our publishing company, we recently published Dermot Miller’s The Way, and his travelogue, which took in the Camino de Santiago (something that Saramago briefly mentions), is the exact opposite as it is a book very much rooted in its location. While both books (the former is a novel and the latter is non-fiction) share a preoccupation with food and churches, it’s intriguing to see two very different approaches to roughly the same idea.    

Mostly satisfying

Perhaps the best compliment you can pay to a book is that it connects with a thought or even insecurity you have. So, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Saramago gave voice to something I always ponder when I travel: how can the traveller truly connect with a place when it has hundreds of years of history, and we are just passing through. He even sardonically makes fun of people who think they can understand a church after only being in it for ten minutes. Faced by vast swathes of tangible and intangible landscapes, his inclination is to make jokes, invent, imagine, and like any human, fill in the gaps with what seems logical, even if it is completely wrong.

These sequences are bolstered by the myths that are peppered through the book, stories that most countries have, and which never disappoint.

Added to this is a cast of characters. He perhaps talks a bit too much about the pretty women, and there is the waiter he strikes up a conversation with, a bereaved and sad man that accompanies Saramago on a trip the next day. When people are met and never seen again, honesty can be the hallmark of conversations, but what is curious is that later in the story, he deliberately keeps a frank conversation from us because he wants to keep us, the reader, in the ethereal clouds with him. It was as frustrating as it was inconsistent. And there are the children who are unimpressed with his map, the ‘barbarian English’ that ask for steak in a region known for its fish, and the old women that begrudgingly give him the church key, and one who fears he is a vandalising Jehovah’s Witness come to destroy the altar and religious paintings.

Saramago, for his part, is open to the locals, but is an irascible traveller, short of patience. If they tell him something too depressing, he wants to leave them in his wake. After all, he’s on holiday.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned church descriptions can actually become a bit tedious. As much as I enjoy walking around them wherever I go, most are similar enough and I suspect that few people have the desire to read in-depth descriptions of architectural features. 

But in the midst of the negatives, he talks about how museums should modernize and offer context, a justified distrust of monarchs, praise for cloistered monks, the delight that traditional Portuguese tiles are back in fashion, things that the reader can connect and agree with, ideas that, for the most part, are still relevant today. Whenever the book threatens to bore you, Saramago pulls you back and hooks you all over again.

Final thoughts

All of this, in an appropriately Saramago way, is longwinded attempt at saying that I recommend the book, but in small doses. Otherwise, the pages and the numerous Portuguese villages blend together in a blur of black ink and church steeples, forcing both reader and traveller to lose their footing.

Sometimes the book can be too esoteric, but in the parlance of today, the book is more of a vibe than a history. At its best, like the passages where he describes being in the middle of a cloud-covered valley, the book works like the best impressionist paintings – you feel the essence of its truth, and the profundity Saramago is striving for comes, unlike the valley, into view.

And remember...…

This epic book of a few hundred pages deals with a lot of themes. And at its heart, is the enduring connection between Ireland and Spain.We run a bilingual publishing company focused on bringing the best stories in Spanish and English to readers around the world. We have published fiction and non-fiction, and all out amazing books are found on our shop.

Thanks for reading!