[Styparty]

Thirty years separate Jos? Saramago?s Terra do Pecado and Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, his first and second novels. He justified this gap on the basis that he had nothing to say. In between he worked manual jobs, translated books and wrote book reviews and opinion columns for magazines and newspapers.

The Manual follows the life of H., a mediocre portraitist who knows he?s a mediocre portraitist. A businessman, S., commissions a portrait from him, but the painter has difficulty completing the task, which leads him to start writing his experiences trying to paint S.?s portrait.

Once the portrait is completed, H. continues to write. The novel becomes his autobiography but also a commentary on the craft of autobiography, and the nature of identity and truth in fictional or personal writings. For instance he evokes the writings of authors who?ve penned autobiographies (Rousseau?s Confessions), fictionalised biographies (Yourcenar?s Memoirs of Hadrian), and fictional autobiographies (Defoe?s Robinson Crusoe).

At times the novel becomes a travel book narrating H.?s visit to Italy to see all the great masters of painting. For H., travels are another way of writing autobiography. But this also turns the novel into a fascinating guide to Renaissance art.

Towards the end I found the novel losing its focus from H.?s ramblings to a plot involving H.?s relationship with M., the sister of one of H.?s friend who is arrested by the secret police for political reasons. But this is also the part of the novel that meant more for me. Manual is the only Saramago novel that deals so openly with the dictatorship, which leaves me thinking that he started this novel before the 1974 coup and slowly he transformed it into something else.

This is the only Saramago novel to date to employ the first-person narrative. The novel is still written in a rather conventional style, but quite distant from Terra do Pecado, which for me was an attempt at imitating E?a de Queiroz? naturalism without any of his characteristic humor. Manual is funnier, in a modern sarcastic and deprecating way. Saramago still obeys punctuation, but one can already see his love for long sentences, for personal asides, for the narrator?s wandering voice, for wordplay. In a way, the Manual was his writing manual, teaching him how to write like Saramago, clearing the path for his future novels.