“I’ve been wanting to tell a fairy story for a long time”: José Sararamago’s O Lagarto

Abstract

“This story is about fairies.” This declarative sentence, which is also a paragraph, begins the illustrated album O Lagarto (The Lizard) (2016), with text by José Saramago and illustrations by J. Borges. In this article, bearing in mind Saramago’s relationship with literature aimed at children and young adults, we will study The Lizard as a verbal text and as a pictorial or visual text, and we will try to identify and understand the messages that it contains. The text was first published more than four decades ago and was initially intended only for a public (adults and newspaper readers) very different from the one targeted by this illustrated album (children and young people), so we will also consider the question of which genre it belongs to.