The Stone Raft: A Voyage Beyond the Borders of Europe

The Stone Raft is a novel by José Saramago, the Portuguese writer and 1998 Nobel laureate in literature, published in Lisbon in 1986, the year Spain and Portugal joined the European Economic Community. It was translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero, and George Sluizer made a film of it in 2002. Its Persian translations include those by Mehdi Ghobraei (Hashemi) and Kiumars Parsay (Nashr-e Elm), both titled Balam-e Sangi.

Synopsis

One day a huge crack opens along the Pyrenees and the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, breaks away from the continent of Europe. The vast landmass begins to drift into the Atlantic like a raft of stone. Governments, scientists and the media try to explain a phenomenon that fits none of the known laws of nature. People flee the coasts and the order of daily life falls apart.

Meanwhile five inhabitants of the drifting peninsula, each of whom has had a strange and inexplicable experience, gradually come together. Joana Carda draws an indelible line in the earth with a stick, Joaquim Sassa has thrown a stone into the sea, José Anaiço is followed everywhere by a flock of starlings, Pedro Orce, an old pharmacist, feels the earth tremble beneath him, and Maria Guavaira unravels an old sock that yields an apparently endless length of blue thread. With an unidentified dog they travel through a land that is itself travelling, and their fate becomes bound up with the land moving beneath their feet.

Critique One: Geography as a Political Question

Kirkus Reviews reads the book as a playful what-if in which Saramago "slyly satirizes current European and international politics." The reviewer enjoys the chain of strange portents and the young Europeans rioting under the slogan "We are Iberians too," and calls the novel "a splendidly imagined epic voyage on an unlikely ship" and "a fabulous fable."

David Gilmour, a historian of Spain and Italy, sees the same link with history from another angle in The New York Review of Books. The novel, he notes, was published in the year Spain and Portugal joined the European Community, Gilmour recalls that Saramago himself described the impulse behind the novel as a kind of "historical grudge," but argues that the author's resentment of how the rich countries of northern Europe treated Portugal and Spain turns, in parts of the novel, into an exaggerated grievance. He points out that Saramago himself later left Portugal for the Canary Islands.

The imagined separation can also be read as a chance to picture new ties. A land that drifts away from Europe, west and south across the ocean, reminds the reader of Iberia's shared history with Latin America and Africa.

Critique Two: When Governments Seek to Explain the Impossible

As the peninsula breaks away, government agencies and scientific institutions attempt to explain and contain the crisis. Publishers Weekly calls the book a "charming Portuguese political fable" and enjoys the bureaucrats fretting as the land mass heads for the Azores; it finds the political satire "marvelously amusing," lifted by nimble prose and metaphysical touches. Kirkus, too, notes the politicians who respond only with ineffectual statements.

The impossible is told so matter-of-factly that the reader, instead of looking for a scientific explanation, turns to the characters' reactions. Saramago's humour comes from this shift: a world whose order an impossible event has upset, in which the officials sometimes behave more absurdly than the event itself.

Critique Three: Saramago's Language, Innovation or Obstacle?

Saramago's style here is marked by long sentences, flowing, minimally punctuated dialogue and a narrator who frequently intervenes. In The New York Review of Books, David Gilmour admires this style in Saramago's tighter novels but writes that here his punctuation, only commas and full stops, sometimes leaves the reader puzzled about who is speaking. The wit is sporadic and "all too often the humor is pedantic and contrived," and "none of the characters in The Stone Raft is real or interesting."

Publishers Weekly, for all its praise, has two reservations: an unexplained darkness intrudes, with Saramago heckling his characters for no clear reason, and the conclusion "seems abrupt," its somber tone striking the reviewer as unconvincing.

Where They Agree and Differ

All three reviews attend to the political side of The Stone Raft, but they differ on its importance and literary success: for Kirkus a fabulous fable and sly satire, for Publishers Weekly an amusing satire with a weak ending, for Gilmour a historical grievance peopled by lifeless characters. They also differ on Saramago's style, nimble to one and at times confusing and tiresome to another. Even so, the novel can also be read beyond its political allegory, as the story of five travellers who, for all their differences, must find a way to live together on unstable ground. In this reading the peninsula's voyage is not only a political allegory, and human relationships make up part of its meaning.

Sources: Kirkus Reviews (May 1, 1995); Publishers Weekly (May 1, 1995); David Gilmour, "Adrift in Iberia," The New York Review of Books (Oct. 5, 1995).