Published by Vintage, part of Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback
£8.99
Author:
Jose Saramago
Format: Paperback
EAN: 9780099520481
£8.99
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9780099520481
Published: 7 Oct 2010
Born in Portugal in 1922 in the tiny village of Azinhaga, José Saramago was only eighteen months old when he moved with his father and mother to live in a series of cramped lodgings in a working-class neighbourhood of Lisbon. Nevertheless, he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence, its river landscape and olive groves seeping deep into his memory.
Shifting back and forth between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this touching book is a mosaic of memories, a gathering together of the fragmented recollections that make up the idea of one's youth. Written with Saramago's characteristic wit and honesty, Small Memories traces the formation of an artist fascinated by words and stories from an early age and who emerged, against all the odds, as one of the world's most respected writers.
By the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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The great thing about this memoir of boyhood is how unportentous it is for the most part
- Scotsman
The lasting impression left by the self-portrait is of an abiding loneliness, nostalgia, and loss, leavened by humour and an unfeigned humility
- Times Literary Supplement
A moving account of his childhood and adolescence...Small Memories will delight
- The Spectator
The humiliations and joys of childhood, magnified by time, are delicately revisited
- Financial Times
A real insight into the making of a great writer
- Independent
The voice of small memories is so immediate, genial and full of simple affection for the boy he was, that reading it feels very much like sharing a fireside with a talkative uncle... The book's epigraph reads 'Let yourself be led by the child you were' and this seems to encapsulate Saramago's attitude to writing: a childlike guilelessness and innocence channelled through a wise old mind
- Observer
It's impossible not to be charmed by this fluid, spontaneous-seeming memoir of boyhood from the late Portuguese Nobel Laureate, Jose Saramago [...] For all its delightful novelty, however, the childhood described here is also beguilingly universal: the superstitions and terrors, the mysteries and joys
- Daily Mail
A powerful and nostalgic memoir
- The Times
The elliptical prose style that earned Saramago the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 imbues these snapshots with a sense of time irrecoverably lost as the author, who died earlier this year, reprises the significant episodes of his youth. Any lack of drama will be of little consequence to admirers of Saramago, whose mostly rural vignettes reflect the emotional pitch of an illustrious literary career
- Financial Times
José Saramago is one of the most important international writers of the last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922 in the small rural village of Azinhaga, he was in his fifties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication of Baltasar & Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, which included plays, poetry, short stories, non-fiction and over a dozen novels, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in June 2010.
