Jose saramago book6/28/2023 ![]() His work is politically astute, imaginative and outspoken, and full of rage at social injustice, systemic idiocy and state repression. ![]() ![]() I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. Sketched out pretty much just like that in the blurb – a dynasty, the land, the sweep of a century – I expected something akin to The Grapes of Wrath, but Steinbeck doesn’t need to worry: Raised from the Ground failed to move or even particularly engage me. The family’s story tracks the story of Portugal’s political turmoil through the twentieth century – the coming of the Republic, the dictator Salazar, the awakening of the Communist movement – as the trickle-down effects of regime and policy changes alter the lives of the farm labourers that populate the latifundio. Set in the Portuguese province of Alentejo, on a vast agricultural estate known as the latifundio, Raised from the Ground follows the fortunes (misfortunes) of the Mau Tempo (Bad Weather) family, from the feckless patriarch, Domingos and his suffering wife, Sara da Conceição, to their agitator son, João, and his children and grandchildren. If you know your Saramago, you’ll be in familiar territory if not, expect politics, a scathing, self-conscious and omniscient narrator, and some very, very long sentences. The latest posthumous English-language Saramago release is an early work, Raised from the Ground, originally released in Portuguese in 1980 and now newly translated and hard-backed. ![]()
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