Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by Jose Saramago
Portuguese fiction
Original title – Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia
Translator – Giovanni Ponteiro
Source – Library edition
I’m having a slow Spanish / Portuguese Lit month this year, but I aim to review mainly books from Portugal, which is the second from Portugal. This is also from the best-know Writer from Portugal, the late Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize. I picked this from the library because it was an earlier book I have reviewed a later novel and the earlier novel by him Skylight that came out a few years ago in English for the first time. It also came not long after the fall of the fascist regime in Portugal that had reigned the country for many years. The book looks at the later part of the Salazar regime and the use of the Painter and Industrialist as the book ends those hit by the government.
It was not until fifteen days later that S. explained why he wanted this portrait, so much at variance with his nature and outlook as a man of his time. I never ask my clients in this blunt manner why they decided to have their portrait painted. Were I to do so, I should give the impression of having little esteem for the work which provides me with a living. I must proceed (as I have always done) as if a portrait in oils were the confirmation of a life, its culmination and moment of triumph, and therefore accept the inevitable fact that success is the prerogative of the chosen few. To ask would be to question the right of these chosen souls to have their portrait painted, when this privilege is clearly theirs by right and because of the large sum of money they are paying and the sumptuous surroundings in which they display the finished work, which they alone appreciate according to how they value themselves.
Talking about the painting
The book follows an artist called H, who is commissioned to do a portrait of an Industrialist called just S. There is a fun line early on in the book when he passes comments on the art and how S looks in real life. While doing this, he also beds the great man, the secretary of S, while doing the painting. All this is told by H a man in the Bourgeois world of the regime just keeping in there by his art, which isn’t the best, but he dreams of being like the great artists of the world as he talks about their paintings, this saw a lot of looking up art like the man with grey eyes.All this is because he is having his fling with Olga. Alongside this, a close friend of his is arrested by the secret police and is in prison. He meets and has another fling with his friend’s sister. He talks about the pictures he has seen as he works on this second portrait of the great S. Another interesting was a list late on of great Portuguese novels and then trying to find them in English and discovering there were only a couple available to us in English.
In the presence of the couple from Lapa (reminiscent of certain characters in Portuguese novels: Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca by Júlio Dinis, A Morgadinha de Val-flor by Pinheiro Chagas, Os Teles de Albergaria by Carlos Malheiro Dias, As Donas dos Tempos Idos by Caetano Beirão, O Barão de Lavos by Arnaldo Gama, Os Maias by Eça de Queiroz and O Senhordo Paço de Ninães by Camilo Castelo Branco) the chameleon did not change its skin.
Boring but this was the liost of portuguese novels with just a few availlable in English
I like this book steeped in art. I think this is Saramago making a personal voyage around the art that has touched him as a writer. It is a very visual book but a book full of relationships that are passionate in nature but brief, firey sex and games. He fleshes out H as an artist with this. He is a man who has that artistic charisma, if not maybe the talent that always goes with it. It also has the backdrop of a secret police coming and taking artists and intellectuals.The latter bitter and of the Salazar regimes is burning in the background. the creative process seen through H eyes but also a man struggling with the desire to be like those great portrait artist he has seen over the years. Have you a favourite book by Saramago? Where next do I want to leave his big ones to review last. Have you a favourite book by him,
Winston score – B exciting look at an artist and what inspires him in the later years of the Salazar regime?sa
I haven’t read this one – in fact, it’s a while since I read any Saramago and I should really do something about it. It still upsets me that he died just before he would have come to Edinburgh!