José de Sousa SaramagoGColSEGColCa (European Portuguese:[ʒuˈzɛðɨˈso(w)zɐsɐɾɐˈmaɣu]; 16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was aPortuguese writer. He was the recipient of the1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality."[1] His works, some of which can be seen asallegories, commonly presentsubversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing thetheopoetic human factor. In 2003Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today"[2] and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of theWestern canon",[3] whileJames Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant."[4]
Saramago was born in 1922 into a family of very poor landless peasants inAzinhaga, Portugal, a small village inRibatejo Province, some one hundred kilometres northeast ofLisbon.[9] His parents were José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade. "Saramago", the Portuguese word forRaphanus raphanistrum (wild radish), was the insulting nickname given to his father, and was accidentally incorporated into his name by the village clerk upon registration of his birth.[9]
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. He spent vacations with his grandparents in Azinhaga. When his grandfather suffered a stroke and was to be taken to Lisbon for treatment, Saramago recalled, "He went into the yard of his house, where there were a few trees, fig-trees, olive trees. And he went one by one, embracing the trees and crying, saying goodbye to them because he knew he would not return. To see this, to live this, if that doesn't mark you for the rest of your life," Saramago said, "you have no feeling."[11] 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 as alathe operator, he worked as a car mechanic for two years. At this time Saramago had acquired a taste for reading and started to frequent a public library in Lisbon in his free time. He marriedIlda Reis, a typist and later artist, in 1944 (they divorced in 1970). Their only daughter, Violante, was born in 1947.[9] By this time he was working in the Social Welfare Service as a civil servant. Later he worked at the publishing companyEstúdios Cor as an editor and translator, and then as a journalist. By that time, in 1968, he met and became lover of writerIsabel da Nóbrega, the longtime partner of author and criticJoão Gaspar Simões. Nóbrega became Saramago's devoted literary mentor, to whom he would later dedicateMemorial do Convento andO Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis.
After thedemocratic revolution in 1974, on 9 April 1975, during the rule ofVasco Gonçalves, Saramago became the assistant director of the newspaperDiário de Notícias, and the editorial line became clearly pro-communist. A group of 30 journalists – half the editorial staff – handed the board a petition calling for the editorial line to be revised and for it to be published. A plenary was called and, following an angry intervention by Saramago, 24 journalists were expelled, accused of being right-wingers. After theCoup of 25 November 1975 that put an end to the communistPREC, Saramago, in turn, was fired from the newspaper.[12]
Saramago published his first novel,Land of Sin, in 1947. It remained his only published literary work until a poetry book,Possible Poems, was published in 1966. It was followed by another book of poems,Probably Joy, in 1970, three collections of newspaper articles in 1971, 1973 and 1974 respectively, and the long poemThe Year of 1993 in 1975. A collection of political writing was published in 1976 under the titleNotes. After his dismissal fromDiário de Notícias in 1975, Saramago embraced his writing more seriously and in following years he published a series of important works includingManual de Pintura e Caligrafia (1977),Objecto Quase (1978),Levantado do Chão (1980) andViagem a Portugal (1981).
Saramago did not achieve widespread recognition and acclaim until he was sixty, with the publication of his fourth novel,Memorial do Convento (1982). Abaroque tale set during the Inquisition in 18th-century Lisbon, it tells of the love between a maimed soldier and a young clairvoyant, and of a renegade priest's heretical dream of flight. The novel's translation in 1988 asBaltasar and Blimunda (byGiovanni Pontiero) brought Saramago to the attention of an international readership.[9][13] This novel won the Portuguese PEN Club Award.
For the former novel, Saramago received the BritishIndependent Foreign Fiction Prize. The multilayeredThe History of the Siege of Lisbon deals with the uncertainty of historical events and includes the story of a middle-aged isolated proofreader who falls in love with his boss. Saramago acknowledged that there is a lot of himself in the protagonist of the novel, and dedicated the novel to his wife.[15]
In 1986 Saramago met a Spanish intellectual and journalist,Pilar del Río, 27 years his junior, and he promptly ended his relationship with Isabel Nóbrega, his partner since 1968.[16] They married in 1988 and remained together until his death in June 2010. Del Río is the official translator of Saramago's books into Spanish.
Saramago joined thePortuguese Communist Party in 1969 and remained a member until the end of his life.[17] He was a self-confessedpessimist.[18] His views aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication ofThe Gospel According to Jesus Christ.[19] Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation ofJesus and particularlyGod as fallible, even cruel human beings. Portugal's social-democratic government, led by then-prime ministerAníbal Cavaco Silva, did not allow Saramago's work to compete for theAristeion Prize,[9] arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result, Saramago and his wife moved toLanzarote, an island in the Canaries.[20]
In 1998 Saramago was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature with the prize motivation: "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality."[21]
Saramago was expected to speak as the guest of honour at the European Writers' Parliament in 2010, which was convened in Istanbul following a proposal he had co-authored. However, Saramago died before the event took place.[22]
Saramago suffered fromleukemia. He died on 18 June 2010, aged 87, having spent the last few years of his life inLanzarote, Spain.[23] His family said that he had breakfast and chatted with his wife and translator Pilar del Río on Friday morning, after which he started feeling unwell and died.[24]The Guardian described him as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation",[23] while Fernanda Eberstadt ofThe New York Times said he was "known almost as much for his unfalteringCommunism as for his fiction".[5]
Saramago's English language translator,Margaret Jull Costa, paid tribute to his "wonderful imagination," calling him "the greatest contemporary Portuguese writer".[23] Saramago continued his writing until his death. His most recent publication,Claraboia, was published posthumously in 2011. Saramago had suffered frompneumonia a year before his death. Assuming a full recovery, he was set to appear at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2010.[23]
Saramago's funeral was held in Lisbon on 20 June 2010, in the presence of more than 20,000 people, many of whom had travelled hundreds of kilometres, but also notably in the absence of right-wingPresident of PortugalAníbal Cavaco Silva, who was holidaying in theAzores as the ceremony took place.[25] Cavaco Silva, the Prime Minister who removed Saramago's work from the shortlist of theAristeion Prize, said he did not attend Saramago's funeral because he "had never had the privilege to know him".[8] In an official press release, Cavaco Silva claimed having paid homage to the literary work of Saramago.[26] Mourners, who questioned Cavaco Silva's absence in the presence of reporters,[8] held copies of the red carnation, symbolic ofPortugal's democratic revolution.[25] Saramago's cremation took place in Lisbon,[25] and his ashes were buried on the anniversary of his death, 18 June 2011, underneath a hundred-year-old olive tree on the square in front of the José Saramago Foundation (Casa dos Bicos).[27]
TheJosé Saramago Foundation announced in October 2011 the publication of a "lost novel" published asSkylight (Claraboia in Portuguese). It was written in the 1950s and remained in the archive of a publisher to whom the manuscript had been sent. Saramago remained silent about the work up to his death. The book has been translated into several languages.[28]
Saramago's experimental style often features long sentences, at times more than a page long. He used full stops sparingly, choosing instead a loose flow of clauses joined by commas.[9] Many of his paragraphs extend for pages without pausing for dialogue (which Saramago chooses not to delimit by quotation marks); when the speaker changes, Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's clause. His works often refer to his other works.[9] In his novelBlindness, Saramago completely abandons the use of proper nouns, instead referring to characters simply by some unique characteristic, an example of his style reflecting the recurring themes of identity and meaning found throughout his work.
Saramago's novels often deal with fantastic scenarios. In his 1986 novelThe Stone Raft, theIberian Peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe and sails around the Atlantic Ocean. In his 1995 novelBlindness, an entire unnamed country is stricken with a mysterious plague of "white blindness". In his 1984 novelThe Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (which won the PEN Award and theIndependent Foreign Fiction Award),Fernando Pessoa'sheteronym survives for a year after the poet himself dies. Additionally, his novelDeath with Interruptions (also translated asDeath at Intervals) takes place in a country in which, suddenly, nobody dies, and concerns, in part, the spiritual and political implications of the event, although the book ultimately moves from a synoptic to a more personal perspective.
Saramago addresses serious matters with empathy for thehuman 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.
When asked to describe his daily writing routine in 2009, Saramago responded, "I write two pages. And then I read and read and read."[29]
The Portuguese government lambasted his 1991 novelO Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel according to Jesus Christ) and struck the writer's name from nominees for the European Literature Prize, saying the atheist work offended Portuguese Catholic convictions.
The book portrays a Christ who, subject to human desires, lives with Mary Magdalene and tries to back out of the crucifixion.[30] Following theSwedish Academy's decision to present Saramago with theNobel Prize in Literature, the Vatican questioned the decision on political grounds, though gave no comment on the aesthetic or literary components of Saramago's work. Saramago responded: "The Vatican is easily scandalized, especially by people from outside. They should just focus on their prayers and leave people in peace. I respect those who believe, but I have no respect for the institution."[6]
Many of his novels are acknowledged as political satire of a subtle kind. It is inThe Notebook that Saramago makes his political convictions most clear. The book, written from a Marxist perspective, is a collection of blog entries from September 2008 to August 2009. According toThe Independent, "Saramago aims to cut through the web of 'organized lies' surrounding humanity, and to convince readers by delivering his opinions in a relentless series of unadorned, knock-down prose blows."[32] His political engagement has led to comparisons withGeorge Orwell.[33]
When speaking toThe Observer in 2006, Saramago said he "believe[s] that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it's the citizen who changes things. I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement."[34]
During theSecond Intifada, while visitingRamallah in March 2002, Saramago said that "what is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened atAuschwitz ... A sense of impunity characterises the Israeli people and its army. They have turned into rentiers of the Holocaust."[4] In an essay he wrote expanding on his views, Saramago wrote of Jews: "educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted . . . on everyone else . . . 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."[35] Critics of these statements charged that they wereantisemitic.[10][36] Six months later, Saramago clarified. "To have said that Israel's action is to be condemned, that war crimes are being perpetrated – really the Israelis are used to that. It doesn't bother them. But there are certain words they can't stand. And to say 'Auschwitz' there ... note well, I didn't say that Ramallah was the same as Auschwitz, that would be stupid. What I said was that the spirit of Auschwitz was present in Ramallah. We were eight writers. They all made condemning statements,Wole Soyinka,Breyten Breytenbach,Vincenzo Consolo and others. But the Israelis weren't bothered about those. It was the fact that I put my finger in the Auschwitz wound that made them jump."[4]
During the2006 Lebanon War, Saramago joinedTariq Ali,John Berger,Noam Chomsky, and others in 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".[37]
He was also a supporter ofIberian Federalism. In a 2008 press conference for the filming ofBlindness he asked, in reference to theGreat Recession, "Where was all that money poured on markets? Very tight and well kept; then suddenly it appears to save what? lives? no, banks." He added, "Marx was never so right as now", and predicted "the worst is still to come."[38]
TheSwedish Academy selected Saramago as the 1998 recipient of theNobel Prize for Literature. The announcement came when he was about to fly out of Germany after the Frankfurt Book Fair, and caught both him and his editor by surprise.[9] The Nobel committee praised his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony", and his "modern skepticism" about official truths.[13] The choice of Saramago was generally well received internationally, but was heavily criticized by the bourgeois press in his home country and also by theVatican City who questioned the decision on political grounds and called it "yet another ideologically slanted award."[40][6]
At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 1998,Kjell Espmark of theSwedish Academy described Saramago's writing as:
literature characterised at one and the same time by sagacious reflection and by insight into the limitations of sagacity, by the fantastic and by precise realism, by cautious empathy and by critical acuity, by warmth and by irony. This is Saramago’s unique amalgam.[41]
In 2024, Saramago's widow Pilar del Rio and theJosé Saramago Foundation donated a number of Saramago's belongings to theNobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, including a pair of his glasses, a stone found inLanzarote he kept at his home, and a manuscript written in his youth.[42]
^Saramago, Jose (20 April 2002)."De las piedras de David a los tanques de Goliat".El País. In Spanish: "educados y formados en la idea de que cualquier sufrimiento que hayan infligido . . . a los demas . . . siempre sera inferior a los que ellos padecieron en el Holocausto, los judios arañan sin cesar su herida para que no dejede sangrar, para hacerla incurable, y la muestran al mundo como una bandera."
Baptista Bastos,José Saramago: Aproximação a um retrato, Dom Quixote, 1996
T.C. Cerdeira da Silva,Entre a história e a ficção: Uma saga de portugueses, Dom Quixote, 1989
Maria da Conceição Madruga,A paixão segundo José Saramago: a paixão do verbo e o verbo da paixão, Campos das Letras, Porto, 1998
Horácio Costa,José Saramago: O Período Formativo, Ed. Caminho, 1998
Helena I. Kaufman,Ficção histórica portuguesa da pós-revolução, Madison, 1991
O. Lopes,Os sinais e os sentidos: Literatura portuguesa do século XX, Lisboa, 1986
B. Losada,Eine iberische Stimme, Liber, 2, 1, 1990, 3
Pires, Filipe. “Os provérbios por detrás da escrita em In Nomine Dei, de José Saramago. / Proverbs Behind the Writing in José Saramago’s In Nomine Dei”.Proceedings of the Fourteenth Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs, 2 to 8 November 2020, at Tavira, Portugal, edited by Rui J.B. Soares, and Outi Lauhakangas, Tavira: Tipografia Tavirense, 2021, pp. 361–394.
Carlos Reis,Diálogos com José Saramago, Ed. Caminho, Lisboa, 1998
M. Maria Seixo,O essential sobre José Saramago, Imprensa Nacional, 1987
"Saramago, José (1922–2010)".Encyclopedia of World Biography. Ed. Tracie Ratiner. Vol. 25. 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005. Discovering Collection. Thomson Gale. University of Guelph. 25 September 2007.
Sereno, M.H.S., 2005. Proverbial style in novelistic José Saramago.Estudos em Homenagem ao Professor Doutor Mário Vilela, vol. 2 p.657-665. Universidade do Porto. (accessible as part of larger volume)
