Nobel laureate José Saramago’s lost novel is a worthy addition to his oeuvre

An early work by the Portuguese Nobellist was long thought to have been lost by his publisher - happily it's lost no longer.

The Nobel laureate José Saramago wrote Skylight in 1953 when he was starting his career and it was long thought to have been lost. Joao Cortesao / AFP

Posthumous novels by past masters routinely arrive to the accompaniment of loud fanfares rather than – as should be the case – cautionary alarm bells. Literary oblivion is often still the best domain for juvenilia, previously rejected apprentice-work and those misplaced books that miraculously reappear decades later in dusty attics. The recent stream of "lost" novels by Jack Kerouac – from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks to The Haunted Life by way of The Sea Is My Brother – ranged from subpar to egregiously bad. And there was a good reason why Nabokov wanted his executors to destroy his unfinished and underwhelming The Original of Laura on his death. While the publication of such books never tarnishes literary reputations, it does remind us that "classic" writers earn that accolade from selected works, never an entire back catalogue.

The latest example of a new book by a dead writer is Skylight [Amazon.co.uk] by the Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago. In 1953, when he was starting out as a writer, Saramago submitted it to his publishers – only for it to get lost in their offices. It resurfaced in 1989, but after waiting 36 years for a reply Saramago was no longer interested and insisted it should stay unpublished during his lifetime. Now, four years after his death, and with considerably less hullabaloo than that which surrounded Nabokov's book, we have the lost Saramago. But should it have stayed lost?

The novel follows the lives of the inhabitants of an old apartment block in Lisbon in the late 1940s. Saramago’s first chapter is the longest, and intentionally so, as it introduces the reader to the bulk of his large cast. Resembling more cameraman than author, Saramago takes us from one household to another through a succession of open doors and windows. As he roams, soundlessly breaking and entering, he captures snapshots of busy lives and strained emotions for his voyeuristic reader. Having familiarised us with his characters, his shorter subsequent chapters zoom in on one home to showcase its occupants’ daily business and longer-lasting trials.

This, then, is an ensemble piece. Star turns come from cobbler-­philosopher Silvestre and his lodger, Abel; Isaura, who is undergoing an emotional awakening while in a hot, cramped, all-female household; and “irresistible” Lídia, mistress to her possessive, rent-paying “night visitor” Senhor Morais.

Equally commanding are those that not only have to live cheek-by-jowl but are locked into unhappy marriages: Emílio and Carmen have endured eight miserable years (“We played with life and now we’re paying for it”) while at the more extreme end the brutish and degenerate Caetano is insensitive to his wife Justina’s grief over their dead daughter and threatens to beat her to a pulp.

Unlike that other portrayal of a tight-knit residential society, Balzac's Old Goriot, Skylight eschews intrigue, preferring instead to focus on quotidian domesticity to underscore dead-end drudgery, repressed longing and thwarted dreams. Saramago's characters gossip, struggle to make ends meet, listen to music and read (Lídia highlighting favourite passages with lipstick). It begins with all the elements of a kitchen-sink drama until Saramago reconstitutes the parts into a series of deft character studies of "narrow, shrivelled lives, lives lit by viewless windows".

What should be a joyless turn-off proves to be strangely compelling. We relish the metaphysical debates staged between Silvestre and Abel, just as we feel for Isaura as she is “tormented by an objectless desire, by a desire for desire and for an equal fear of it too”. Towards the end, home truths are unleashed in the form of verbal bouts or aggressive acts. Abel for some is not a lodger but an “interloper”; Lídia for others is no independent woman but “a blot on the lives of honest folk” who deserves to be “wiped from the face of the earth”.

The novel's reliance on realism places it at quite a remove from the later books upon which Saramago's reputation rests. Gone are the trademark flights of fancy on display in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) and Blindness (1995), together with their extended paragraphs and clotted page-long sentences. And yet while Skylight feels stylistically different, it contains many of Saramago's thematic concerns, particularly individuality and the need to connect. Additionally, when characters share their distrust of capitalists, disbelief in God and admiration for Fernando Pessoa we see more than the early stages of a writing career, we see the writer himself.

Acclaimed translator Margaret Jull Costa has performed her usual magic to bring what Saramago called "the book lost and found in time" to English-speaking readers. A chronicle about separate lives in adjoining rooms, Skylight may lack the bold artistic feats of what was to come, but it is shot through with more than enough flashes of brilliance to justify it seeing the light of day.

Malcolm Forbes is a regular contributor to The Review.