[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.

[KevinDonae]

I remembered that when I read this novel, I thought this couldn't have been written by Saramago, It's so different from all his works, I couldn't understand it very well. It was a long time ago since I read it, but I have to say that whenever I re-read I'll have to get a different approach, to dive into the novel without thinking it's a Saramago, because you can get lost easily.

Said that, I think that in this book we still see a Saramago trying to find his true soul as a novelist. As you said, the novel is in first person, a characteristic he will not return in his later novels; again, he stills uses punctuation. If I'm not wrong, his next novel is Levantado do Ch?o, and in this one we can see the process completing more and more, although he still uses punctuation here. I think his transformation completes totally in Memorial do Convento, his first masterpiece and the first novel where we see Saramago as we know him right now.

[Styparty]

He achieves his famous syntatic style already in Levantado do Ch?o. I once had the pleasure of visiting a Saramago exhibition and I read personal documents explaining how he found his voice. He went to Alentejo to do research and interviewed people that spoke in that way, full of old sayings, asides, parallel stories, etc. Saramago wanted to capture their oral speech and wrote the novel like that. He had already started writing the novel before he found this voice and so rewrote the beginning to fit the new style

What I give credit to Baltasar and Blimunda for is for introducing the magical realist element in his novels.