Looking back in anger

Portugal has given the world two distinguished novelists. Eça de Queiros, is the Proust of Portugal. His masterpiece, The Maias, describes the decline of an aristocratic family in the late 19th century. Whereas Eça was a member of the Portuguese intellectual elite, José Saramago was born in a wretched shack in the the rural hamlet of Azinhaga. When he was two, his family moved to a series of two-roomed flats in the poorest quarters of Lisbon. I cannot think of any writer of consequence who endured such grinding poverty in his childhood and youth. His grandfather was a foundling and both he and his wife illiterate peasants. In an early essay I compared Saramago to Thomas Hardy, as a village boy who had made a career as a writer. This was a grave mistake. Hardy wrote his early novels in a comfortable cottage with a large garden, and his mother was a great reader.