Jose Saramago

José Saramago
Born	José de Sousa Saramago November 16 1922(1922-11-16) Azinhaga, Ribatejo, Portugal
Died	June 18 2010 (aged 87) Tías, Lanzarote, Spain
Occupation	Playwright, Novelist
Nationality	Portugal
Writing period	1947 – 2010
Notable work(s)	Baltasar and Blimunda, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Blindness, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1998

José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE (pronounced [ʒuˈzɛ sɐɾɐˈmagu]; November 16, 1922 - June 18, 2010) was a Nobel-laureate Portuguese writer, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor rather than the officially sanctioned story.

Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He founded the National Front for the Defense of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with among others Freitas-Magalhaes. Saramago was born in Portugal but later moved to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain, residing there with his Spanish wife, journalist Pilar del Río, until his death in 2010.

Biography

Saramago was born into a family of landless peasants in Azinhaga, Portugal, a small village in the province of Ribatejo some hundred kilometers north-east of Lisbon. His parents were José de Sousa and Maria de Piedade. "Saramago," a wild herbaceous plant known in English as the wild radish, was his father's family's nickname, and was accidentally incorporated into his name upon registration of his birth. In 1924, Saramago's family moved to Lisbon, where his father started working as a policeman. A few months after the family moved to the capital, his brother Francisco, older by two years, died. Although Saramago was a good pupil, his parents were unable to afford to keep him in grammar school, and instead moved him to a technical school at age 12. After graduating, he worked as a car mechanic for two years. Later he worked as a translator, then as a journalist. He was assistant editor of the newspaper Diário de Notícias, a position he had to leave after the political events in 1975. After a period of working as a translator he was able to support himself as a writer.

Saramago married Ilda Reis in 1944. Their only child, Violante, was born in 1947. In 1988, Saramago married the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río, the official translator of his books into Spanish. They remained together until his death in June 2010.

Politics

Saramago was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party since 1969, and a self-described pessimist. His views aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus Christ as a fallible human being. Portugal's conservative government would not allow Saramago's work to compete for the European Literary Prize, arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result, Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Canaries.

Saramago also aroused controversy ostensibly as a result of his opposition to Israel's actions in Palestine and Lebanon. In 2002, he wrote in El Pais, the international Spanish-language paper of record, that Israel brutalizes Palestinians because of Judaism itself.

Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, he signed a statement together with Tariq Ali, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn, condemning what they characterized as "a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation."

Literary themes

Saramago’s novels often deal with fantastic scenarios, such as that in his 1986 novel, The Stone Raft, wherein the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe and sails about the Atlantic Ocean. In his 1995 novel, Blindness, an entire unnamed country is stricken with a mysterious plague of “white blindness.” In his 1984 novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (which won the PEN Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award), Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym survives for a year after the poet himself dies.

Using such imaginative themes, Saramago succinctly addresses the most serious of subject matters with empathy for the human condition and for the isolation of contemporary urban life. His characters struggle with their need to connect with one another, form relations and bond as a community; and also with their need for individuality, and to find meaning and dignity outside of political and economic structures.

Style

Saramago's experimental style often featured long sentences, at times more than a page long. He used periods sparingly, choosing instead a loose flow of clauses joined by commas. Many of his paragraphs match the length of entire chapters by more traditional writers. He used no quotation marks to delimit dialog; when the speaker changes Saramago capitalized the first letter of the new speaker's clause. In his novels Blindness and The Cave, Saramago sometimes abandoned the use of proper nouns; indeed, the difficulty of naming is a recurring theme in his work.

Legacy

José Saramago was in his mid-fifties before he won international acclaim; his publication of Baltasar and Blimunda brought him to the attention of an international readership. This novel won the Portuguese PEN Club Award.

Famous American literary critic Harold Bloom stated that he considered José Saramago the "most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and considers him to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praised "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant."

Major Works

Title	Year	English title	Year	ISBN
Terra do Pecado	1947
Os Poemas Possíveis	1966
Provavelmente Alegria	1970
Deste Mundo e do Outro	1971
A Bagagem do Viajante	1973
As Opiniões que o DL teve	1974
O Ano de 1993	1975
Os Apontamentos	1976
Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia	1977	Manual of Painting and Calligraphy	1993	ISBN 1857540433
Objecto Quase	1978
Levantado do Chão	1980
Viagem a Portugal	1981	Journey to Portugal	2000	ISBN 0151005877
Memorial do Convento	1982	Baltasar and Blimunda	1987	ISBN 0151105553
O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis	1986	The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis	1991	ISBN 0151997357
A Jangada de Pedra	1986	The Stone Raft	1994	ISBN 0151851980
História do Cerco de Lisboa	1989	The History of the Siege of Lisbon	1996	ISBN 015100238X
O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo	1991	The Gospel According to Jesus Christ	1993	ISBN 0151367000
Ensaio sobre a Cegueira	1995	Blindness	1997	ISBN 0151002517
Todos os Nomes	1997	All the Names	1999	ISBN 0151004218
O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida	1997	The Tale of the Unknown Island	1999	ISBN 0151005958
A Caverna	2001	The Cave	2002	ISBN 0151004145
O Homem Duplicado	2003	The Double	2004	ISBN 0151010404)
Ensaio sobre a Lucidez	2004	Seeing	2006	ISBN 0151012385
Don Giovanni ou o Dissoluto Absolvido	2005
As Intermitências da Morte	2005	Death at Intervals	2008	ISBN 1846550203
As Pequenas Memórias	2006

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bastos, Baptista. José Saramago: Aproximação a um retrato. Dom Quixote, 1996. ISBN 978-9722013413
• Cerdeira da Silva, T.C. Entre a história e aficção: Uma saga de portugueses. Dom Quixote, 1989. ISBN 978-9722007320
• da Conceição Madruga, Maria. A paixão segundo José Saramago: a paixão do verbo e o verbo da paixão. Campos das Letras, Porto, 1998. ISBN 978-9726100607
• Costa, Horácio. José Saramago: O Período Formativo. Ed. Caminho, 1998. ISBN 978-9722111607
• Kaufman, Helena I. Ficção histórica portuguesa da pós-revolução. Madison, 1991. OCLC 25452165
• Lopes, O., Os sinais e os sentidos : Literatura portuguesa do século XX. Lisboa: 1986. OCLC 159845062
• Losada, B. "Eine iberische Stimme," Liber 2 (1) (1990): 3.
• Reis, Carlos. Diálogos com José Saramago. Ed. Caminho, Lisboa, 1998. ISBN 978-9722112284
• Seixo, M. Maria. O essential sobre José Saramago. Imprensa Nacional, 1987. OCLC 181066292
• "Saramago, José (1922-)." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Ed. Tracie Ratiner. Vol. 25. 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005. Discovering Collection. Thomson Gale. University of Guelph, 2007. ISBN 978-0787622213

External links

All links retrieved August 5, 2022.

• The Unexpected Fantasist, a portrait of José Saramago, written by Fernanda Eberstadt and published August 26, 2007 in The New York Times Magazine.
• Interviews with Saramago in video
• Translation of interview with Saramago in El País - 12-Nov-2005

Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1976-2000)

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