The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Cave, by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
reviewed by Brian Evenson

José Saramago. The Cave. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. Harcourt, 2002. 307 pp. $25.00.

With The Cave Saramago returns again to the novel (his last book was a nonfiction work on Portugal), using the form to provide a critique of capitalism and mall culture, with his habitual attention to language and his long multivoiced sentences. At the book’s heart is Cipriano Algor, an aging potter who lives with his daughter Marta and her husband Marçal in a small village. Cipriano has been selling his pots to The Center, a quickly growing assemblage of apartments and “a succession of arcades, shops, fancy staircases, escalators, meeting points . . . endless numbers of ornaments, electronic games, balloons, fountains and other water features, platforms, hanging gardens, posters, pennants, advertising billboards, mannequins, changing rooms, the façade of a church . . . ” This discontinuous and nonparallel list goes on, both suggesting that The Center contains everything within its walls and that the quality of anything consists only of its illusive commodity value. When The Center cancels their order for his pots, replacing them with plastic vessels, Cipriano begins to try to make ceramic dolls, hoping to sell these to The Center. In the meantime, Marçal, who works as a guard at The Center, is given residency privileges, and he and his pregnant wife and Cipriano make preparations to move into The Center. As Cipriano thinks, “from now on everything would be little more than appearance, illusion, absence of meaning, questions with no answers.” Indeed, once in The Center, the trio begin to make disturbing discoveries that in the end drive them back out into the world again, unsure of what they want to do but certain they do not want to remain in The Center. Though The Cave is the least impressive of Saramago’s three most recent novels (the others being Blindness and All the Names), it becomes undeniably compelling in the last seventy pages. Saramago, though eighty, remains an original writer.