The Elephant's Journey,
by Jose Saramago, Random House, $38.88
Lauded by greats like Ursula Le Guin and Yan Martel, Nobel Prize winner Saramago - who died last year - here tells a tale of wit and warmth that almost belies his sardonic intellectual reputation. Yes, his dismissal of paragraphing, punctuation and
lots of other conventions can be a bit challenging but, as an introduction to his writing, you couldn't do better than this.
It tells of a group of characters, including Solomon the Elephant and Subhro his mahout, on an arduous 16th-century trek from Lisbon to Vienna, via Spain, the Mediterranean and the Alps, with lots of strange stop-offs on the way. History, royalty and religion get a jolly good debunking, albeit in a framework of gentle whimsy and the pragmatism of ordinary folk.
The elephant starts out needing a good scrub and ends up being a noble gift, the mahout rises from humble lackey to lofty sage and the peasants and foot-soldiers maintain their status as the salt and pepper of the earth.
Regal, official and churchy types, on the other hand, come across as the clots and buffoons that inhabit the works of Boccaccio, H.C. Anderson and Monty Python. Reformations and Inquisitions hover in the background, simultaneously threatening and profoundly silly, while reality - and history - get a thorough going-over: "The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath." Pure magic.
