SOURCE: A review of Cademos de Lancarote: Diario III, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 1, Winter, 1997, p. 133.

[In the following review, Preto-Rodas presents an overview of the themes in Saramago's Notebooks from Lancarote.]

As Portugal's best-known living author, Jose Saramago has attracted considerable attention in recent years with his annually published diaries (see WLT 70:2, p. 385). Each volume presents his public with views and comments culled from a crowded calendar. The latest edition, written in these Notebooks from Lancarote (the volcanic island in the Canaries archipelago where Saramago now lives in a kind of self-imposed exile), relates events from 1995, the most varied year to date.

Always the novelist, Saramago acknowledges that his diary is less a confession than a process of self-discovery whereby the author-narrator reviews his growth and development. A recurring motif concerns his initial point of departure as a poor boy who first learned to appreciate the...