NP Jose Saramago profile: pig and tree influence

[Doug Millison]

at http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/arts/saramago-profile.html

Pigs, and  love of trees...

Excerpts from Alan Riding's article:

"But the flurry of recent weeks has also led him to reflect on his life, to
rummage in his past for the incidents and influences that  explain why,
what and how he writes.

"Two childhood memories stand out. Although his parents moved to Lisbon in
1924, when he was 2, he always spent vacations with his grandparents in his
birthplace in the village of Azinhaga in the Ribatejo region. They bred
pigs and, in the winter, he recalled, they would take weak piglets to their
bed.

" "So we can imagine the two oldies, covered with blankets, in a cold
house, freezing outside, and between them, like their own children, two or
three piglets, being heated by human warmth," he said, slipping into
storytelling mode. "


"Years later, he said, his grandfather suffered a stroke and was to be
taken to Lisbon for treatment. "He went into the yard of his house, where
there were a few trees, fig trees, olive trees," Saramago said, "and he
went one by one, embracing the trees and crying, saying goodbye to them
because he knew he would not return. To see this, to live this, if that
doesn't mark you for the rest of your life, you have no feeling."

[...]

"People who say I write historical  novels are totally wrong," he said.
"They are novels that deal with  things that happened, but it's the  same
to me if they happened yesterday or 2,000 years ago. I see time as an
enormous cloth where everything that happens is  projected in a chaotic
manner. It is the writer's job to find the line that  links things that
happen at different times and facts that  appear to have nothing to do with
each other."

(I recently read Saramago's _The History of the Siege of Lisbon_ and highly
recommend it -- it's a wonderful novel.)

-Doug