José Saramago has finished his latest novel. The title: The Elephant’s Journey.

Dear Friends,

Writing this book has been no easy task. Saramago first started work on it when he was incubating an illness that took months to diagnose and which ultimately proved so virulent that we feared for his life. While in hospital, even he began to doubt he would finish the book. Nevertheless, seven months on, Saramago, fully recovered and with renewed energy, has just completed something which he feels is more story than novel, and which describes the journey, at once epic, prosaic and funny, of an Asian elephant called Solomon, who, in obedience to the absurd caprice of some sixteenth-century monarch, travelled across half of Europe.

The Elephant’s Journey is a book of many voices in which characters enter, leave and return in accordance with the narrative demands imposed by the author and by the characters themselves. The elephant and his mahout have names, as do other historical characters, but there are also the anonymous people with whom the members of the caravan meet and share perplexities or travails or, indeed, the harmonious joy of a roof after many nights spent sleeping out in the open.

It isn’t a long book – about 240 pages – but Saramago’s distinctive imagination, compassion and humanity are all there, filling every line. Also present is the author’s other great saving grace, his humour, which he uses as a way of helping us to penetrate the labyrinth of warring humanities without having to renounce our naturally inquisitive nature as human beings and readers. As always, there is irony, sarcasm and beauty, as well as a sense of the responsibility and sheer joy of writing.

Saramago’s new book is not an historical novel, even though it’s based on History, or, to be more exact, on history with a small ‘h’, and even though characters from the past are brought back to life in order to inhabit the same pages - although not necessarily the same adventures - as other characters who have sprung from the author’s imagination. You’ll see what I mean when you read the book. The Elephant’s Journey is punctuated according to Saramago’s own rules; dialogue and narrative flow seamlessly into one, to form a whole that the reader must fit to his own breath. The reader is that fundamental being whom Saramago always considers and respects and is constantly addressing, whether to warn him of the consequences of certain actions or to remind him of others, and whom he likes to draw into the text, because writing and reading are not innocent actions, but attempts to force the intelligence to go always a little further, beyond Vienna, beyond Valladolid, beyond Lisbon, and beyond the person we were when we woke up this morning and found ourselves with another day ahead of us.

Dear Friends, I simply wanted to tell you that we have another book by Saramago to absorb into our lives as readers. You won’t be disappointed; on the contrary, you will, I’m sure, read it with the same excitement with which it was written, the same excitement that hovers over every line and every word. It isn’t just another book, it’s the book we’ve been waiting for and which has finally found a safe haven, the reader. Solomon the elephant is not so lucky, but we’ll say no more about that for now; let’s wait until the Autumn, and then, in several languages simultaneously, we can discuss pages, adventures and dénouements, which are the raw materials of fiction and of life.

With very best wishes to you all,

Pilar