José Saramago
 |
| Jose Saramago |
Portuguese author
Written By:
José
Saramago, (born November 16, 1922,
Azinhaga, Portugal—died June 18, 2010, Lanzarote, Canary
Islands, Spain), Portuguese novelist and man of letters who was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.
The son of rural labourers,
Saramago grew up in great poverty in Lisbon.
After holding a series of jobs as mechanic and metalworker, Saramago began
working in a Lisbon publishing firm and eventually became a journalist and
translator. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969, published several
volumes of poems, and served as editor of a Lisbon newspaper in 1974–75 during
the cultural thaw that followed the overthrow of the dictatorship of António Salazar. An anticommunist
backlash followed in which Saramago lost his position, and in his 50s he began
writing the novels that would eventually establish his international
reputation.
One of Saramago’s most
important novels is Memorial do convento (1982; “Memoirs of the
Convent”; Eng. trans. Baltasar and Blimunda). With
18th-century Portugal (during the Inquisition)
as a backdrop, it chronicles the efforts of a handicapped war veteran and his
lover to flee their situation by using a flying machine powered by human will.
Saramago alternates this allegorical fantasy with grimly realistic descriptions
of the construction of the Mafra Convent by thousands of labourers
pressed into service by King John V. Another ambitious novel,
O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (1984; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis),
juxtaposes the romantic involvements of its narrator,
a poet-physician who returns to Portugal at the start of the Salazar
dictatorship, with long dialogues that examine human
nature as revealed in Portuguese history and culture.
Saramago’s practice of
setting whimsical parables against realistic historical backgrounds in order to
comment ironically on human foibles is exemplified in two novels: A jangada
de pedra (1986; The Stone Raft; film 2002), which explores the
situation that ensues when the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from
Europe and becomes an island, and O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo
(1991; The Gospel According to Jesus Christ), which posits Christ
as an innocent caught in the machinations of God and Satan. The outspoken
atheist’s ironic comments in The Gospel
According to Jesus Christ were deemed too cutting by the Roman Catholic Church, which pressured
the Portuguese government to block the book’s entry for a literary prize in
1992. As a result of what he considered censorship,
Saramago went into self-imposed exile on the Canary Islands for the remainder
of his life.
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Among Saramago’s other
novels are his first, Manual de pintura e caligrafia (1976; Manual of
Painting and Calligraphy), and such subsequent works as Historia do
cerco de Lisboa (1989; The History of the Siege of Lisbon), Todos
os nomes (1997; All the Names), O homem duplicado (2002; The
Double), As intermitências da morte (2005; Death with Interruptions),
and A viagem do elefante (2008; The Elephant’s Journey). Ensaio
sobre a cegueira (1995; “Essay on Blindness”; Eng. trans. Blindness;
film 2008) and Ensaio sobre a lucidez (2004; “Essay on Lucidity”; Eng.
trans. Seeing) are companion novels. In 2012 his novel Claraboya
(“Skylight”), which had been written in the 1950s but languished in a
Portuguese publishing house for decades, was posthumously published.
Saramago also wrote poetry,
plays, and several volumes of essays and short stories, as well as
autobiographical works. His memoir As pequenas memórias
(2006; Small Memories) focuses on his childhood. When he received the Nobel
Prize in 1998, his novels were widely read in Europe but less
known in the United States; he subsequently gained popularity worldwide. He was
the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize. In 1999 the
biennial Prémio Literário José Saramago (José Saramago Literary Prize) was
established in his honour to recognize young authors writing in Portuguese.
With affection,
Ruben
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