Completed in 1953 when José Saramago was barely into his 30s, the manuscript for Skylight disappeared into the rejected pile at a Portuguese publishing house. Crushed, Saramago wrote nothing more for 20 years. Only in 1989 was the single copy rediscovered, once Saramago had resumed writing and become famous. He refused to allow Skylight to be published in his lifetime. It has become the Nobel laureate's posthumous gift, and it's a literary explosion of youthful talent. The story unfolds in the Lisbon of the early 1950s, when World War II has ended, but not the Salazar dictatorship. The opening chapter alone is a bravura performance, a round-robin sequence of encounters and conversations as the tenants of the building call on each other to borrow the phone, to do a favor, to lower the noise, from apartment to apartment.
On the ground floor works Silvestre, the philosophical old cobbler. He and his adored, plump-and-getting-plumper wife need to take in a lodger to help them pay the rent. On the second floor live two seamstress sisters in their 30s, along with their mother and aunt. One sister keeps all her secrets in a locked diary. The other is about to imitate a character in a book she's reading, with disastrous consequences. Downstairs, Justina seems to still be mourning her eight-year-old daughter who died two years ago of meningitis. She hates her brutal husband, who can't keep his eyes off their neighbor Lidia, the gorgeous kept woman who has a visit three nights a week from Paulino, a man who has just hired the lovely, lazy 18-year-old daughter of another tenant to be his secretary and... well, that's when it starts to get complicated. Add to this tangled scenario the new young boarder, Abel, who doesn't intend to stay long and allows himself no ties to anyone, and you have umpteen plot threads about to converge.
Skylight is an exuberant classic farce with a philosophical spin. The tale unfolds from multiple points of view that intersect and overlap. It crackles with subtext, subtle set-ups and unexpected payoffs, turning narrative somersaults with ease. Just beneath the surface are secret rages and shames, painful memories and guilty regrets, an apartment house full of buried skeletons of lost loves and unforgiven humiliations. It's not perfect. It has flaws. Yet all the elements of Saramago's thought-provoking genius are here, and several of the story threads have profoundly satisfying endings as we watch these early Saramago characters struggle to be happy in the endless war between freedom and habit, on the tricky slope between seeming and becoming. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.
Shelf Talker: Lost for 36 years and never published in his lifetime, this is Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago's early philosophical/farcical novel about the tenants of a Lisbon apartment house.