"In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays"

Jose Saramago’s admission that he is not a novelist, but “a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn’t know how to write essays” offers a window into his creative process and literary ethos. Saramago, esteemed for his complex narratives and philosophical themes, downplays the label of novelist, suggesting he approaches fiction less out of mastery and more as an alternative to his perceived incapacity with another form. His novels, dense with commentary and intellectual rumination, often blur the line between fiction and essay, weaving social critique, historical reflection, and speculative thought together. Here, Saramago admits that the novel became his medium of default, an indirect byproduct of failing at another pursuit.

Underlying this self-effacing humor is a profound statement about the intersections of literary forms. Essayists traditionally engage with ideas directly, structured around argument or investigation. Saramago, finding himself unable to conform to the formal clarity and directness of the essay, channels those same impulses into fiction. As a result, his novels are cerebral, digressive, and essay-like, privileging inquiry over plot, speculation over resolution. His narrative voice often feels like an extended interior monologue, questioning customs, politics, ethics, and language itself. Novels such as “Blindness” or “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” become fictional essays, meditations in narrative disguise.

There is humility and self-mockery here but also an insight into the porousness of genres. Saramago suggests that art is sometimes born of inadequacy, the failure to fit a mold produces innovation. His work exemplifies how fiction can serve as an alternate vehicle for critical thought, how the boundaries between essay and novel can be productively blurred. For Saramago, writing novels is less about following the conventions of fiction than about pursuing ideas that might have belonged in essays, had he known how to shape them in that form. His literary identity is shaped as much by failure as by invention, reminding us that writing is often an act of searching rather than arriving.