Non-fiction: Notebook from Lanzarote

Overview
Notebook from Lanzarote is a series of fragmentary essays and travel notes written while José Saramago stayed on the volcanic island of Lanzarote. The pieces move between close observation of a peculiar landscape and wandering meditations on solitude, memory and the craft of writing. Scenes and reflections accumulate like sketches in a journal, creating an impressionistic portrait rather than a linear narrative.
The book resists simple categorization as travel literature or political essay. Landscapes and local details provide the scaffolding for broader inquiries into culture, history and human presence, and the tone alternates between wry distance and intimate confession.

Setting and Observations
The island's geology, fields of black lava, skeletal fennel, windswept coastlines, functions as both subject and metaphor. Saramago lingers over textures of stone and sea, the way light falls across desiccated soil, and the small, often uncanny arrangements of human habitation against a raw natural backdrop. Everyday sights, a fisherman, a ruined wall, a roadside chapel, become starting points for associative leaps.
Descriptions of place are tactile and precise without losing a sense of the uncanny. The physical austerity of Lanzarote often prompts reflections on impermanence, resilience and the human impulse to leave marks on inhospitable ground.

Themes and Motifs
Solitude appears as a recurring theme: not merely absence of company but a condition that sharpens attention and provokes thought. Memory and forgetting recur as counterpart forces, with the island serving as a repository for both personal recollection and communal traces. The act of writing itself is a persistent subject; the journal entries often turn inward to interrogate motives, methods and the ethical weight of representation.
Cultural and historical echoes thread through the notes. Tourism and commodification, the contrast between local life and outside expectations, and the legacies of political structures surface repeatedly. The book balances lyric attention to the immediate with a steady suspicion of easy consolations or patriotic mythologies.

Narrative Voice and Style
The prose is characteristically Saramagian: conversational yet dense, playful with rhetoric while capable of sudden, precise aphorism. Sentences can be long and sinuously constructed, building argument and image in a single breath. Shorter, clipped observations appear alongside more meditative passages, producing a rhythm that mimics walking, looking, pausing.
Humor and irony provide relief and critique. There is an undertow of moral seriousness, but it is often delivered with a detached wit that invites readers to recognize absurdities without prescribing easy judgments. The voice feels like a companionable presence, curious, skeptical and alert to detail.

Political and Cultural Commentary
Political reflection threads through the travel writing without ever becoming didactic. Observations about development, tourism and cultural commodification evolve into broader critiques of modernity and power. The island's landscapes, shaped by both volcanic violence and human intervention, offer a stage for thinking about responsibility and consequence.
Saramago's left-leaning sensibilities surface in attentive concern for social inequities and historical amnesia. Yet the commentary is more diagnostic than polemical; it aims to record how systems manifest in everyday life and how small acts of attention can expose larger patterns.

Significance and Legacy
Notebook from Lanzarote occupies a distinct place among Saramago's works as a contemplative interlude that clarifies recurring preoccupations: language, solitude, ethics and place. It exemplifies how travel writing can function as philosophical inquiry, using the particulars of a remote island to illuminate universal questions.
For readers interested in how a major novelist treats observation and thought outside a fictional frame, these pages offer concentrated and richly textured meditations. The collection endures as an invitation to slow down, look closely and consider the political and poetic implications of ordinary scenes.