The Collected Novels of José Saramago

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IT’S FITTING THAT the novels of José Saramago should have an electronic edition, a virtual presence, for it was Saramago who first spoke of virtual literature —a fiction that “seems to have detached itself from reality in order better to reveal its invisible mysteries” (The Notebook). He credits Jorge Luis Borges with the invention of this genre, but he himself brought to it the one quality of greatness that Borges’s fictions lack: a passionate and compassionate interest in ordinary people and everyday human life.

We probably don’t really need any more categories, but virtual literature might be a useful one, differing from science fiction and speculative fiction with their extrapolative bent, fantasy with its wholly imagined realities, satire with its meliorative indignation, magic realism which is indigenous to South America, and modernist realism with its fixation on the banal. I see virtual literature sharing ground with all these genres, as indeed they all overlap, yet differing from them insofar as its aim is, as Saramago put it, the revelation of mystery.

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