Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
Originally published in 1977 and now finally available for the first time in the U.S., the first novel by the Portuguese master (and Nobel laureate) tells the story of a middle-aged portrait painter’s creative and political awakening. H., as our narrator is known, knows the portraits he is commissioned to paint are an artistic failure from the first brushstroke; in them he sees himself “futile, weary, disheartened and lost.” His evenings are a series of hollow sexual conquests that ultimately reinforce his loneliness. But H. begins to emerge from his stagnancy when he discovers that writing—about his travels in Italy, at first—unlocks creative energies that painting cannot. With this realization comes the promise of real romance but also, in the desperate last days of the Salazar autocracy, certain responsibilities. All fiction is biography, Saramago reminds us, and it is indeed tempting to understand H.’s awakening as a depiction of Saramago’s own. But this is Saramago, after all, so even a portrait of the artist as a young man hints at the profound and the universal. --Brendan Driscoll