The Lives of Things: When Objects Refuse to Obey
A chair, a car, or a door can seem obedient until its failure exposes the arrangements built around it. In The Lives of Things, José Saramago uses such disturbances to ask who controls ordinary life and what happens when that control breaks down. This collection of six short stories turns material objects, political authority, and imagined creatures into instruments of unsettling inquiry. Its fantasy remains closely attached to the social consequences of apparently reasonable decisions.
The collection appeared in Portuguese as Objecto Quase in 1978. It includes The Chair, Embargo, Reflux, Things, The Centaur, and Revenge. These are distinct narratives, not chapters of a single novel. Their connections emerge through recurring questions about domination, dependence, bodily existence, and the limits of systems that presume everything can serve a predetermined purpose.
The Lives of Things rewards readers who enjoy watching an idea develop beyond its initial absurdity. A premise may seem comic, but following its consequences often produces something considerably darker. Objects do not merely acquire charming personalities. They interrupt the belief that the human world rests on secure foundations or that its official explanations deserve automatic trust.
The collection’s strongest quality is the relation between imagination and reasoning. Instead of using fantasy to escape material circumstances, the stories make those circumstances strange enough to examine. An impossible event can reveal a familiar arrangement more clearly than a realistic description would.
That approach also asks for patience. The reader must follow explanations, qualifications, and changes of scale. The Lives of Things offers neither cosy enchantment nor an uninterrupted sequence of shocks. Its pleasure lies in discovering how an apparently minor disruption can expose an entire order of life. When objects refuse to obey, obedience itself becomes a question.
The Lives of Things Begins with Unreliable Support
“The Chair” gives material support an unmistakably political significance. A dictator’s seat becomes the object through which apparent stability reveals its vulnerability. The premise recalls Salazar’s fall from a chair, but the story’s interest exceeds the recognition of a historical reference. It makes authority depend on something that power usually treats as negligible.
Rule depends on what supports it. A chair allows a person to occupy a position; its failure turns that position into movement. Read politically, the object undermines the image of sovereignty as self-sufficient. The body that commands remains subject to physical conditions, however insistently its office denies ordinary weakness.
“Embargo” relocates dependence to a recognisably modern environment. A man and his car become caught in a disturbing relation while petrol grows scarce. An object associated with mobility begins to threaten autonomy. The convenience that appears to extend a person’s freedom can also establish the terms on which that freedom operates.
In The Lives of Things, these premises work because familiar objects already organise behaviour before anything supernatural happens. Dependence precedes the breakdown. Fantasy makes an existing relation visible by pushing it beyond ordinary tolerance.
The political transformation of a familiar world offers a useful comparison with Animal Farm by George Orwell. Both works make concrete arrangements carry arguments about power, although these stories resist the continuous historical pattern of a single extended fable.
Their effect is less a lesson delivered from outside than an invitation to inspect supports we rarely notice. The Lives of Things makes the chair and car important because people have already entrusted them with parts of their lives.
A City Loses Its Things
In “Things,” an urban order becomes unstable as objects behave unexpectedly and disappear. The disturbance reaches a civil servant whose routines depend on the reliability of his surroundings. What begins as a material problem becomes a challenge to an arrangement of life that treats obedience as normal and dissent as malfunction.
The environment stops cooperating. That change reverses a familiar assumption: objects should remain available, predictable, and useful. Once their availability becomes uncertain, the people who administer the system can no longer take their own authority for granted. Their explanations become part of the story’s unease.
The central question in The Lives of Things therefore extends beyond whether an object possesses a secret life. It concerns the habits through which people themselves become things: classified by function, expected to comply, and valued according to usefulness. The material disturbances give that reduction an imaginative form without reducing every detail to a single symbol.
An instructive comparison is In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka. There, a machine embodies a punitive order and the conviction of its defender. Here, the failure of familiar surroundings unsettles another system that expects material arrangements to confirm its authority.
Strangeness exposes ordinary coercion. A city need not look spectacularly monstrous to organise dependence. The story makes daily familiarity part of the problem: what people accept because it functions may conceal the conditions under which it functions.
The Lives of Things is particularly effective when it lets the reader experience that loss of familiarity before offering a settled interpretation. The city becomes a question. Its instability forces attention towards relationships between administration, material comfort, and human freedom that its normal operations might have kept invisible.
The King’s Cemetery and the Limits of Control
“Reflux” follows a king who cannot endure reminders of death. He orders a single enormous cemetery and the transfer of the country’s dead into it. His private fear becomes a public engineering project. Roads, taxation, labour, and administration expand around the attempt to remove mortality from his field of vision.
A personal anxiety becomes national policy. The story’s absurdity does not depend on an irrational ruler doing something inexplicable. It depends on an understandable fear receiving resources and obedience out of all proportion to its legitimacy. The result makes the distance between the monarch’s comfort and his subjects’ burdens visible.
The scheme’s later consequences matter as much as its conception. Life gathers around the cemetery, inequalities reappear, and burial escapes the official arrangement. The system cannot permanently separate people from the condition it tries to conceal. In The Lives of Things, a plan becomes most revealing when the world starts answering it.
Mortality denied or displaced also shapes Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. The connection concerns the distortion produced by an unwillingness to face bodily limits. This story enlarges that disturbance into the geography of an entire country.
“The Centaur” approaches bodily vulnerability from another direction. Its half-human, half-horse figure cannot fit comfortably into the categories around it. A body exceeds its classification. The creature’s presence suggests that the wish to impose order can injure what that order cannot accommodate.
Together, these stories make The Lives of Things more than a satire of bad decisions. They question the ambition to make existence completely manageable. Death and bodily difference remain resistant to the arrangements intended to contain them.
Writing Style: Following an Absurd Idea Seriously
The Writing Style of The Lives of Things makes fantasy persuasive through the attention paid to its consequences. Narration explains procedures, anticipates objections, and follows the practical implications of a premise that ordinary experience would reject. The result combines intellectual play with a disturbing sense of administrative credibility.
The voice treats impossibility as a working assumption. Once that assumption enters the narrative, roads must be built, bodies must move, and institutions must respond. The world becomes strange through the same explanatory habits that normally make it seem reasonable. This is why the stories can feel both fantastical and materially exact.
“Reflux” offers a particularly clear example. Its expanding account of the cemetery connects fear to construction, commerce, and settlement. Digression changes the scale of the argument rather than merely delaying a plot. Detail exposes the price of an idea. The reader sees what a sovereign wish requires from people who did not choose it.
The intellectual use of impossible premises invites comparison with The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges. Both collections ask readers to follow speculative possibilities seriously. Here, material labour and institutional arrangements often occupy more space than metaphysical elegance.
The Lives of Things can consequently demand more concentration than its compact size suggests. Readers who prefer rapid incident may feel delayed by elaboration. Yet the strongest passages need that elaboration: their political meaning emerges through the chain of consequences.
The humour depends on controlled seriousness. A narrator who immediately announced every absurdity would leave less for the reader to discover. The matter-of-fact voice lets an apparently sound explanation reveal its own violence, instability, or concealed self-interest.
Five Fragments from “Reflux”
These brief quotations from Giovanni Pontiero’s translation come from “Reflux,” one complete story in The Lives of Things. They follow the movement from official confidence to the return of circumstances the king cannot control.
- “the older the person, the higher the tax” The cemetery’s financing makes age a financial liability. A calculation presented as fair exposes the burdens created by the ruler’s fear. The joke works through the calm explanation of a policy whose premise deserves immediate suspicion.
- “All kings are great” This compressed assertion turns inherited status into its own evidence. Authority supplies its own certificate. The narrative’s apparent acceptance exposes the circular reasoning by which a privileged position becomes proof of the qualities it claims to possess.
- “all death is death” The king’s anxiety cannot stop at human mortality. Once the project accepts the logic of removing every reminder, its scope keeps expanding. The statement shows how a seemingly simple principle can make a policy impossible to satisfy.
- “Like attracts like.” The phrase appears amid the account of unequal development around the cemetery. Even a project that gathers everyone into one place reproduces social distinctions. The Lives of Things makes spatial organisation reveal relationships that official claims of unity cannot remove.
- “Here” The king’s final instruction contracts a national project into a single location for his own death. The tiny word unsettles the scale of everything that preceded it. The ending makes personal acceptance more decisive than the machinery built to postpone that acceptance. Source: Verso’s complete publication of “Reflux”.
Six Stories, a Portuguese Title, and an English Translation – The Lives of Things
- A 1978 collection: The Portuguese book appeared as Objecto Quase in 1978. Its publication belongs to the period after Portugal’s 1974 revolution. The historical memory of dictatorship matters to the stories, but that does not place the collection’s publication under the former regime.
- Six separate narratives: The book contains six stories with markedly different premises. The chair, car, cemetery, city, centaur, and brief final parable do not belong to one continuous plot. Reading their differences helps preserve the collection’s range instead of turning it into a general celebration of animated objects. Their variety also permits each narrative to establish its own scale, from an individual body’s predicament to a country’s rearrangement.
- A title with another emphasis: Objecto Quase points towards the condition of being almost an object. The English title, The Lives of Things, directs attention towards what objects might do or contain. The difference usefully draws attention to both sides of the book’s concern: material agency and human reduction.
- The translator: Giovanni Pontiero translated the English edition published by Verso. The publisher identifies him in its edition record and in the online presentation of “Reflux.” The quoted English phrases follow that published translation rather than a new rendering from Portuguese. Verso edition.
- Short fiction as exploration: In his account of his development as a writer, the author described these concentrated ideas as suited to shorter narratives rather than novels. That explanation helps illuminate the collection’s formal variety. Each story gives a particular premise room to develop without requiring an entire novel to sustain it.
Why The Lives of Things Resists a Simple Moral
The political force of The Lives of Things comes from making control visible in places where it often escapes notice. A seat supports authority, a vehicle regulates mobility, and a city turns material reliability into a condition of ordinary existence. The collection asks what happens when those supports stop behaving as expected.
The stories offer experiments rather than slogans. Their premises can be described quickly, but their consequences do not fit comfortably into one summary. The collection’s variety also prevents its politics from becoming a single predictable allegory. A centaur’s bodily difference creates another kind of unease from a king’s attempt to manage death.
The brief “Revenge” further changes the scale through a boy’s response to a disturbing encounter with bodily vulnerability. Its brevity and emphasis on action distinguish it from the larger administrative fantasies. That contrast matters: The Lives of Things can approach constraint through a concentrated bodily gesture as well as through the expansion of an entire system.
For another collection that tests the limits of social arrangements through contrasting worlds, consider The Scorpion God by William Golding. The comparison makes the value of formal variation clearer without treating either book as a catalogue of identical lessons.
There are limits to the method. Some figures function more as carriers of a predicament than as fully developed psychological portraits, and the narrative’s elaboration can keep emotional closeness at a distance. Those features may discourage readers seeking intimate realism. They also explain the book’s particular achievement: a compact collection in which imaginative disruptions reveal how power enters objects, bodies, and the explanations people use to organise their world.
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