The Stone Raft

The Premise and the Five Strangers

A woman named Joana Carda draws a line on the ground with an elm stick and the line cannot be erased. A man named José Anaïço is followed everywhere by a vast flock of starlings that will not leave him. A man named Joaquim Sassa throws a stone into the sea and the stone skips impossibly far before sinking. These are the first signs. The Pyrenees crack. The Iberian peninsula detaches from France along the mountain range and begins — impossibly, geologically absurdly, with the calm of a boat leaving a dock — to drift into the Atlantic.

The five strangers who converge on each other are the novel’s human center: Joana Carda and José Anaïço and Joaquim Sassa, plus Pedro Orce (a Spanish pharmacist who feels the earth shake beneath his feet even at sea) and Maria Guavaira (who unravels a blue woolen thread from her sock that extends without end). They travel together in a car with a dog named Ardent, watching the peninsula drift, watching the governments panic, watching themselves fall into something like a chosen family, occasionally into love.

Saramago plays the impossible premise completely straight. The governments issue statements. Scientists attempt explanations. The European Community convenes emergency sessions. The peninsula continues to drift, indifferent to all of it. The straightness of the treatment — the same unbroken-paragraph, subordinate-clause-dense prose that Saramago uses for everything — is what makes the absurdity land. He does not wink at the reader. The stone raft is simply happening, and what matters is how people live inside it.

Iberia Adrift from Europe

The novel was published in Portuguese in 1986, the same year that Portugal and Spain joined the European Economic Community. This is the allegory’s ground: Iberia entering Europe after decades of dictatorship (Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain), entering a European community that had been built around France and Germany and that had its own ideas about what European civilization meant — ideas in which Iberia’s relationship to its colonial empires, to South America and Africa and the Atlantic world, featured only awkwardly.

The peninsula drifting away is the political fantasy made literal: what if Iberia simply left, simply detached from the European north that it has always had an ambivalent relationship with? And where does it drift? South and west, toward the mid-Atlantic, toward South America — toward the former colonies, toward the Portuguese and Spanish speaking world that Iberia’s colonial history created. The destination of the stone raft is not arbitrary. It is the other part of the story that European membership brackets out.

This is political allegory of an unusually good-natured kind. Saramago is not grinding an axe; he is playing with an idea, following it with the novelist’s willingness to be surprised by what the idea contains. The five strangers who travel through the drifting Iberia are not symbols — they are people with histories and complications and a dog — and this is what keeps the allegory from becoming a pamphlet. The political reading enriches the human story rather than replacing it.

The Warmest Saramago

Blindness (1995) is Saramago’s most famous novel and his most harrowing: a plague of white blindness reduces society to its most brutal components, and the reader is not permitted to look away. The Cave (2000) is his most Kafkaesque, a slow, claustrophobic novel about a potter who finds his craft becoming redundant to the shopping mall that has swallowed the town. The Stone Raft is neither of these things. It is warmer than either, and funnier, and more willing to let its characters be happy.

This makes it a better entry point for most readers than Blindness, though Blindness is the more formally radical achievement. The Stone Raft shows what Saramago can do with warmth and playfulness, and demonstrates that the long sentences and unbroken paragraphs and narrator who interrupts himself are not just devices for conveying horror — they can also carry wit and affection and something close to delight. Giovanni Pontiero’s translation, completed before his death, captures the prose’s characteristic movement with care and fidelity.

Saramago received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. He was seventy-six and had been blacklisted by the Portuguese government a decade earlier for The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. The Nobel committee cited his “parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony.” The Stone Raft is the novel where the imagination is most exuberant, the compassion most visible, and the irony most lightly worn.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The most playful and warmhearted novel in Saramago’s major work: an impossible premise played completely straight, a political allegory that never loses sight of its five human travelers and their dog, and an ideal entry to one of the Nobel era’s essential novelists.