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Kleine herinneringen by José Saramago
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Kleine herinneringen (2006)

by José Saramago, Harrie Lemmens

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5462043,810 (3.69)20
A personal account by the late author traces his youth in Lisbon with his parents, marked by frequent visits to his wise grandparents in the village of Azinhaga, his older brother's tragic early death, and his initial encounters with literature.
Member:rutten
Title:Kleine herinneringen
Authors:José Saramago
Other authors:Harrie Lemmens
Info:Amsterdam : Meulenhoff; 154 p., [16] p. pl, 22 cm; http://opc4.kb.nl/DB=1/PPN?PPN=303194561
Collections:Your library
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Small Memories by José Saramago (2006)

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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».
  pfreis86 | Feb 23, 2024 |
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. ( )
  thorold | Oct 15, 2021 |
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. ( )
  msjudy | Feb 27, 2019 |
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. ( )
  Michael.Rimmer | Jul 18, 2018 |
This book is a nice reflection on childhood memories and how we see our own childhoods as adults. It is an autobiography about Saramago's childhood in Portugal, and a glimpse at life in rural Portugal during the 1930's. ( )
  JBarringer | Dec 30, 2017 |
Showing 1-5 of 15 (next | show all)
Saramago died last spring at 87. The book in front of us today is among his final compositions, a slim memoir of his youth titled “Small Memories.” It will not take a place among his major works. In fact — sometimes you must come right out and say these things — it’s mostly a vague and distracted book, one that provides the sensation of gazing on a dim and foggy day through the wrong end of a telescope.
 

» Add other authors (6 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
José Saramagoprimary authorall editionscalculated
Costa, Margaret JullTranslatormain authorsome editionsconfirmed
Lemmens, HarrieTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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rororo (24683)
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Epigraph
Let yourself be led by the child you were.
From The Book of Exhortations
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For Pilar, who had not yet been born and who took so long to arrive
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The village is called Azinhaga and has, so to speak, been where it is since the dawn of nationhood (it had a charter as early as the thirteenth century), but nothing remains of that glorious ancient history except the river that passes right by it (and has done, I imagine, since the world was created) and which, as far as I know, has never changed direction, although it has overflowed its banks on innumerable occasions.
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A personal account by the late author traces his youth in Lisbon with his parents, marked by frequent visits to his wise grandparents in the village of Azinhaga, his older brother's tragic early death, and his initial encounters with literature.

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José Saramago was eighteen months old when he moved from the village of Azinhaga with his father and mother to live in Lisbon. But he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence to stay with his maternal grandparents, illiterate peasants in the eyes of the outside world, but a fount of knowledge, affection, and authority to young José.

Shifting back and forth between childhood and his teenage years, between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this is a mosaic of memories, a simply told, affecting look back into the author's boyhood: the tragic death of his older brother at the age of four; his mother pawning the family's blankets every spring and buying them back in time for winter; his beloved grandparents bringing the weaker piglets into their bed on cold nights; and Saramago's early encounters with literature, from teaching himself to read by deciphering articles in the daily newspaper, to poring over an entertaining dialogue in a Portuguese-French...
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