As Pequenas Memórias é um livro de recordações que abrange o período entre os quatro e os quinze anos da vida de José Saramago: «Queria que os leitores soubessem de onde saiu o homem que sou».

Saramago never wrote his big autobiography, the Book of temptations, often mentioned in his other novels. But he did gather the material he had for it together to compile this little book in which he looks back at his childhood, often seeming to be more interested in the process of remembering and the way early memories get confused and distorted in our minds than he is in the actual content of those memories. He's very conscious that, in his eighties, he doesn't have any other witnesses to refer to for most of the things that happened to him as a small child. Several of the anecdotes in the early part of the book are revised later, as he cross-checks them with other information and realises that they couldn't possibly have happened at the time and place he thought they did. And searching the municipal archives in the hope of resolving the puzzle of when exactly his brother Francisco died draws him off on a complete tangent that resulted in the novel All the names...

But you can also read this as simply a charming, slightly ironic account of growing up in the 1920s in Lisbon and in rural Ribatejo (where his grandparents still lived). There is plenty about poverty, family quarrels, neighbours, school, precocious sexual experimentation, expeditions into the woods, cinema, how he got his (pen-)name, and all the rest of it. Very enjoyable.

The Dutch translation comes with a useful afterword by the translator Harrie Lemmens, summarising Saramago's career after the age of fourteen and taking us through most of his novels. ( )

Déjate llevar por el niño que fuiste.
- Libro de los Consejos

Small Memories - Saramago
3 stars

This may not have been a good choice as my first book by this author. It is a very short collection of vignettes, memories of Saramago’s childhood in Lisbon and the Portuguese village of Azinhaga. It was written and published near the end of his life.

I wanted a book that would provide a picture of Portuguese culture, and this book did give me a limited window into the lives of village and lower income people in the years before WW2. Saramago writes exactly like an elderly person recalling small, but sharply remembered scenes from childhood. His sentences are rambling, backtracking in a quest to place and incident precisely in time and questioning the validity of his own memories. There are gaps and repetition. He references certain events that may have been used in some manner in some of his adult writing. In addition to some traumatic events, he has no difficulty relating his most embarrassing memories from his childhood.

It took me some time to find the rhythm of his overlong sentences. I enjoyed the mild humor and the vivid descriptions of place once I learned to track the main points of each anecdote. However, despite the low page count, the book grew tedious before I finished it. I began to read with one eye, as I would listen with one ear to a lonely, elderly relative who just needed a patient and loving listener. ( )

Small memories because they are of his childhood and adolescence, and because they are not momentous, other than in a personal way. However, Saramago uses these small memories to reflect (however briefly) upon the nature of memory and subjective reality, and of how seemingly trivial incidents in early life have significant repercussions for the adults we become.

The short reflections on sexual awakening, of his drunken aunt's onanism, and of his sexualized torture by a group of older boys (uncomfortably reminicent of the tragic case of Jamie Bulger) make this for the slightly older reader, though I would stress that the details are not overly graphic nor at all lurid. Mostly, this is a wistful remembrance of childhood and of the inevitable passage of time. In the same vein as Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, though not, to my mind, as effective. ( )