The Lives of Things

By José Saramago

A surreal short story collection from the master of what-ifs.

The Lives of Things collects José Saramago’s early experiments with the short story form, attesting to the young novelist’s imaginative power and incomparable skill in elaborating the most extravagant fantasies. Combining bitter satire, outrageous parody and Kafkaesque hallucinations, these stories explore the horror and repression that paralyzed Portugal under the Salazar regime and pay tribute to human resilience in the face of injustice and institutionalized tyranny.

Beautifully written and deeply unsettling, The Lives of Things illuminates the development of Saramago’s prose and records the genesis of themes that resound throughout his novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso
• Release date: Apr 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781781684115

José Saramago

JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Reviews for The Lives of Things

[jbarringer-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Saramago's stories are like modern fairy tales, mysterious, magical and drawing together elements of contemporary life with a liberal dose of mythology and impossibilities. Even when his meaning is obscure (or lost in translation, as may easily be the case) his short stories in The Life of Things feel beautiful. They conjure up a world that rivals the imagery of Pan's Labyrinth or Mirrormask, familiar yet strange and a bit intimidating for all its slow, quiet mundanity.

The first of the stories in this book addresses the absurdly random, seemilgly arbitrary death of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who controlled Portugal until 1968. Salazar suffered a brain hemorrhage after falling and hitting his head, and while there is now evidence to suggest he was in a bathtub when he hit his head, the popular story is that he fell from his chair. Saramago's story explores the fated inevitability of his fall, from his chair, and thus from power.

The rest of the stories in this collection are a bit easier to follow than "The Chair", but all of these stories offer interesting, clever, or beautiful twists to our perception of the world around us. I still prefer Saramago's longer fiction, where he has more space to set up his characters and scenes, but these shorter pieces are still excellent.

[reganrule · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was my first Saramago foray, and I had very high expectations going in. I started with this one because sometimes life only gives you time enough to read short stories, ya know? "The Lives of Things" was first published in Portuguese in 1978, and this nice paperback edition was translated in 2012. The title announces the theme. In each of the 7 short stories, Saramago doesn't explore the mere existence of things, but supposes worlds where things assert themselves as unreifiable objects. In "Things," a futuristic caste society experiences the revolution of OUMIs (objects, utensils, machines or installations). At first small objects disappear and then whole city blocks. In "Reflux," a King, haunted by death, chooses to rid his kingdom of it, digging up all prior remains for deposition in a vast common (but distant) cemetery. Eventually, a new economy grows around the cemetery, and then new towns, etc. Death, the ultimate (and most frightening) Thing, wends its way back to the center of life. In "Embargo," a man dependent on fuel in a rationed economy, spends an unusual day stuck in various lines for petrol, as his car apparently (and mysteriously) breaks down. I won't spoil it, but suffice it to say that the distinction between man and machine is challenged. Similarly, Saramago challenges the distinction between man and chattel by considering the haunted existence of the last remaining centaur, supposing man and beast are "stuck" in analogous ways to Embargo's main character. Saramago evokes a Kafka vibe, which is to say his worlds are by and large bureaucratic and bewildering. It’s not hard to see from these stories why he is so taken by Goncalo Tavares’s work.Pride of place really needs to go to the first story, "The Chair," which makes much more sense if you understand the unannounced context of the story. In 1968, the authoritarian Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira was sunbathing on his deck chair when it broke and he tumbled backwards, causing the brain hemorrhage which would remove him from power and eventually kill him. Saramago begins the chair’s story mere seconds before the chair snaps, and it ends with Oliveira’s head making contact with the ground. So, all told the 25 page story describes about 2 seconds in time. And it is just marvelous.