The Elephant's Journey | José Saramago

When the reader finishes the novel The Journey of the Elephant by the Portuguese José Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, he must ask himself: What does Saramago want to say in this novel? Especially since every work by Saramago carries a new idea that contains multiple connotations. The novel is based on a famous historical event that happened in the sixteenth century when the King of Portugal in 1561 gifted the Archduke of Austria a huge elephant called Salomon, the elephant and its Indian keeper Subhro, a name meaning the white, the heroes of the novel or, more precisely, the journey that started from Lisbon and ended in Vienna passing through Spain then Italy and France, and like all of Saramago's works, the novel is filled with information mixed with truth from Subhro and legends from the Europeans regarding the elephant.