Daniel Soar

Stand by a bookcase and shut your eyes. Run your hand along the spines of the books, concentrating on the question you want an answer to. You may feel a tug, a certain book demanding attention; you may feel that this is mere frivolity, that any selection will be random. Either way, your fingers will linger on a book. The important thing at this stage is to know, with absolute conviction, that...

In 1973, the American writer Harry Mathews, who was then in his mid-forties, was living in Paris. He had been divorced by his first wife, Niki de Saint Phalle; the editor Maxine Groffsky, with whom he had spent the last 12 years, had recently left him to go back to New York; his two children had also gone. It was, he later wrote, a time when his life was ‘at an ebb, professionally and...

“Nothing that happens in Chinese Letter is secure. About two-thirds of the way through, Fritz announces that his mother has been kidnapped by white slave merchants. He has an uncomfortable interview with the police. He goes back home to find that his mother has been returned: the slave merchants had the wrong address. In the space of a few pages, Basara has conjured up a crazed subplot and then coolly deflated it. It’s a ploy that displays the familiar mechanisms of fiction in their undisguised form, showing up the magicians’ tricks for the deceptions they are. There are pleasingly subtle gestures of other kinds: Fritz, dismissed from hospital, has an idiosyncratic difficulty with walking that is a nod to Beckett; he scrawls part of his story on a bench in a nod to Hamsun; the two strangers, slightly less subtly, come from Kafka. Fritz is the sum of a progression that begins with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and ends with Beckett, and he accumulates along the way most of the verbal tics and comic turns that characterise each writer’s outsider.”

All José Saramago’s novels tell a story. Each is predicated on a suggestive and compelling hypothesis: what would happen if the Iberian peninsula were to become detached from the European mainland (The Stone Raft), what would happen if everyone in a country lost their eyesight (Blindness), what would have happened if the crusaders had refused to help the beleaguered Portuguese in...

If one thing is clear by now (and something has to be), it is that the machinery of government is not so much uniformly nefarious as multifariously uniformed: the left hand knows what the right hand wants it to do, but there are proper procedures it should follow in the present circumstances, and the right hand respects that – so long as the left hand does in the end pick up the pieces....