cla·ra·bói·a |clà|
substantivo feminino
1. Parte envidraçada de um telhado para entrar claridade.Ver imagem
2. Fresta ou óculo numa parede para passagem da claridade ou do ar.
3. Poço para ventilação de mina, túnel, etc.
"claraboia", in Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa [em linha], 2008-2013, http://www.priberam.pt/dlpo/claraboia
"Skylight" de José Saramago
Traduzido por Margaret Jull Costa
Editora, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 299 páginas
No site www.bustle.com, é apresentada uma elogiosa critica ao livro "Skylight" - tradução do original "Claraboia", obra datada de 1953.
A "Claraboia", fica marcado pelo seu "tardio nascimento", publicada a titulo póstumo - em 2011, contrapondo, com a data da realização, em 1953.
Após a publicação de "Terra do Pecado" em 1947, que inicialmente foi apresentado ao editor com o titulo "A Viúva"; esta segunda obra ficou marcada pelo silêncio da editora, perdido o rasto... esquicida, supostamente para sempre.
Sob o nome de "Honorato", pseudónimo de José Saramago, terá sido entregue por um amigo, que tentou a sua publicação, através de conhecidos, na editora ENP (Empresa Nacional de Publicidade), de onde, mergulhado num silêncio profundo e num esquecimento de décadas - conhecemos agora a sua história - virá a renascer do pó das catacumbas de um qualquer depósito, quando na década de 80, José Saramago, recebe por parte do Diário de Notícias, a informação da descoberta e recuperação do original, com um pretensioso convite à sua publicação.
A carga simbólica destes acontecimentos, e a nobre decisão tomada pelos herdeiros de José Saramago, no que toca à sua publicação, coloca esta obra no seu devido lugar, que a ordem cronológica da bibliografia assim o obriga, e que, nós os leitores, temos a obrigação de lhe dar a vida que durante décadas não teve.
A vida e a luz do livro, analogia com o titulo, "Claraboia", enquanto elemento concebido para deixar passar a luz, o sol, o que está para lá de, o pulsar do outro lado, merece todo o destaque. Recuperado e cheio de vitalidade, há que desfrutá-lo...
Laura Creste, neste apontamento, escolhe seis obras para serem lidas "ao lado de uma lareira".
"December is an ideal time for settling in with a thick read. A well-picked book is essential whether you’re in for a long plane ride home for the holidays and you need a distraction, or your extended family has gotten into a political debate after a few glasses of wine, and you need to exit to the living room to read by the light of the Christmas tree to avoid them. (No, just me? Moving on.)
There are quite a few good books released this month — things for fans of history, for instance, plus a new Murakami (!) — but if I have to play favorites, I’d say I’m most excited about Ali Smith’s How to Be Both. It’s actually two books in one (a double-gift if you want to give it!) in a complicated genre-bending sort of way.
Early December is also a time to worry about finding the perfect gift. I’m sure you’ll be gifting books, but make sure you don’t forget about giving something to yourself, too, to keep you entertained throughout the dreary winter. The ones on this list are a great place to start.
Here’s a reading list that’ll get you through the holidays:
"Skylight" by José Saramago (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)
There’s a great story associated with the creation of this book, Portugusese novelist José Saramago’s first. The book was nearly lost forever when the author sent it to a publishing house in Lisbon in 1953 and never heard back. When the publishing house was changing offices more than three decades later, they found the manuscript of Skylight in a drawer. At this point, Saramago was well-established in the Lisbon literati and he proudly refused their belated offer to publish it. After his death, however, his estate felt that the public deserved a chanced to read the book.
Saramago’s Skylight is an artful depiction of the every day, and the unknown interiors of the people with whom we live. In the novel, husband and wife are miserable mysteries to each other more often than not, and sisterly love is fraught with unsaid drama. A kept woman entertains her patron, though she’s tired of him; a woman married to a cheating husband wins their battle of wills with her absolute scorn; an aunt endeavors to find out what secrets her nieces are keeping from her. With an omniscient narrator presiding over the neighbors in a small apartment building, the reader catches a glimpse into the surprising ways our lives are interwoven with the people around us. Saramago makes a convincing case for the power of proximity as the strongest force in a relationship.
This first book is understandably less polished than Saramago’s later works, but it’s fascinating to see the germ of his theories about love and how people should, above all, be decent to one another here in their earliest forms. He was compelled by the same themes his entire life, and now Saramago fans can discover Skylight like an entryway to the past."
O San Francisco Gate, apresenta a menção ao livro, acompanhando uma pequena biografia de José Saramago
Aqui, o link,
"Skylight" by José Saramago: review
By Porter Shreve
"After the Portuguese writer José Saramago published his first novel, “Land of Sin,” in 1947, he spent the next several years working on a new book, “Skylight.” But when he delivered his only copy of the manuscript in 1953, his publisher failed to get back to him. Dispirited by this seeming rejection, Saramago dedicated most of his 30s and early 40s to journalism and didn’t write another novel until the 1970s. He brought out a book every year or two thereafter, breaking through with the international best-seller “Baltasar and Blimunda.”
In 1989, the publisher that had held on to “Skylight” for decades contacted the now-famous writer, saying they had unearthed the manuscript after losing it in a move and wanted to publish it. Still not over the slight, Saramago retrieved the novel but refused the offer. He won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 and died in 2010, and only now has his widow, Pilar del Río, decided to publish “the book lost and found in time.”
“Skylight” is a masterwork of characterization, place and point of view. As del Río notes in her preface, it anticipates the complex female characters and many of the prototypes that would appear in Saramago’s later work, “that whole tribe of silent men, free, solitary beings who need to find love in order, however briefly, to break out of their focused, introverted way of being in the world.” The place is an apartment block in a middle-class Lisbon neighborhood soon after World War II during the Salazar dictatorship. The book falls into the small but vibrant category of fiction set in urban buildings whose inhabitants form a cross section of society, a category that includes Emile Zola’s “Pot Luck,” Gloria Naylor’s “The Women of Brewster Place,” Manil Suri’s “The Death of Vishnu” and Alaa Al Aswani’s “The Yacoubian Building.”
At first, the point of view moves like a camera, beginning in the ground-floor apartment of the cobbler Silvestre and his wife, Mariana, on a day they realize they’ll need to take in a boarder to make ends meet. We drift up to the second floor to the seamstress Isaura, who, along with her sister Adriana, barely manages to pay rent on the flat they share with their mother and aunt. Another downstairs neighbor, Justina, appears at their door to complain about the clacking of the sewing machine because it’s interrupting the sleep of her husband, Caetano, an irascible second-shift Linotype operator. On the way back to her apartment, Justina overhears other neighbors, Anselmo and Rosália.
We move to Rosália’s flat, where she’s arguing with her 19-year-old daughter, Claudhina, who has decided to stay home from work on account of a headache. We follow Claudhina downstairs to borrow the phone of the one well-off resident of the block, Dona Lídia, a kept woman who spends her days reading novels and awaiting the thrice-weekly arrival of Paulino Morais. “She knew that the only thing that bound him to her was her body, and so she took every opportunity to show it off, especially now, when her body was still young and shapely.”
Having established each character’s situation, Saramago limits the point of view of the rest of the chapters to individual apartments and the private crises taking place within them. As the focus tightens, the drama intensifies: Silvestre and Mariana’s boarder, Abel, has misled them about his past and turns out to be a mysterious drifter. One insomniac night, repressed, love-starved Isaura finds herself making an advance on her own sister. Caetano’s wandering eye leads Justina to confront him about the women whose photos he carries in his wallet, igniting a series of increasingly unsettling events. And Dona Lídia will live to regret introducing younger, prettier Claudhina to her lover, the man who pays her rent.
The events that fill “Skylight” — adultery, incest, physical, sexual and emotional abuse — are shocking on reflection but within the pages emerge so clearly out of the characters’ loneliness, frustration, longing and misery as to seem inevitable. Perhaps Saramago’s early publisher shelved the manuscript out of fear that Portugal under fascism wasn’t ready for it. But just as he writes toward the end, “At last the day had come when all secrets would be revealed,” it was only a matter of time before a work of such extraordinary honesty and perception would make its way into the world.
Porter Shreve’s fourth novel, “The End of the Book,” was published earlier this year. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com
Skylight
By José Saramago; translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa"
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