“Ursula K Le Guin acclaims the wise comedy of José Saramago”
Ursula K Le Guin has reviewed José Saramago's The Elephant's Journey for the Guardian. Saramago, who died June 18th aged 87, was known not only for his superb fiction, of which The Elephant's Journey will now be the last example, but also for his frank and outspoken politics. The Notebook, published by Verso just two months before Saramago's death, is a collection of his non-fiction writing that exhibits a sharp and relentless political mind at work.
In her review, Le Guin, too, is quick to acknowledge Saramago as a political being:
His preoccupations and politics and passions might seem to belong to a past age: a diehard communist impatient of dictators, subversive of orthodoxies, disrespectful of international corporations, peasant-born in a marginal country and identifying himself always with the powerless, a radical who lived on into an age when even liberals are spoken of as leftist ... But the still more intransigent radicalism of his art makes it impossible to dismiss him from the busy chatrooms of the present.
Visit the Guardian to read the review in full.