José Saramago

José de Sousa Saramago (; 16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Portuguese writer. He was the recipient of the 1998 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." His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant."

Biography Early and middle life Saramago was born in 1922 into a family of very poor landless peasants in Azinhaga, Portugal, a small village in Ribatejo Province, some one hundred kilometres northeast of Lisbon. 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 a lathe 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 married Ilda Reis, a typist and later artist, in 1944 (they divorced in 1970). Their only daughter, Violante, was born in 1947.

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 poem The Year of 1993 in 1975. A collection of political writing was published in 1976 under the title Notes. After his dismissal from Diário de Notícias in 1975, Saramago embraced his writing more seriously and in following years he published a series of important works including Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia (1977), Objecto Quase (1978), Levantado do Chão (1980) and Viagem a Portugal (1981).

Later life and international acclaim

Saramago did not achieve widespread recognition and acclaim until he was sixty, with the publication of his fourth novel, Memorial do Convento (1982). A baroque 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 as Baltasar and Blimunda (by Giovanni Pontiero) brought Saramago to the attention of an international readership. This novel won the Portuguese PEN Club Award.

Following acclaimed novels such as The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Saramago was hailed by literary critics for his complex yet elegant style, his broad range of references and his wit.

For the former novel, Saramago received the British Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The multilayered The 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.

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. 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 the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and remained a member until the end of his life. He was a self-confessed 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 and particularly God as fallible, even cruel human beings. Portugal's social-democratic government, led by then-prime minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, did not allow Saramago's work to compete for the Aristeion Prize,

In 1998 Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature with the prize notation: "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality."

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.

Death and funeral

Saramago suffered from leukemia. He died on 18 June 2010, aged 87, having spent the last few years of his life in Lanzarote, Spain. 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. The Guardian described him as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation",

Saramago's English language translator, Margaret Jull Costa, paid tribute to his "wonderful imagination," calling him "the greatest contemporary Portuguese writer". Cavaco Silva, the Prime Minister who removed Saramago's work from the shortlist of the Aristeion Prize, said he did not attend Saramago's funeral because he "had never had the privilege to know him". In an official press release, Cavaco Silva claimed having paid homage to the literary work of Saramago. Mourners, who questioned Cavaco Silva's absence in the presence of reporters,

Lost novel The José Saramago Foundation announced in October 2011 the publication of a "lost novel" published as Skylight (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.

Style and themes

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.

Personal life

Saramago was an atheist. The Catholic Church criticised him on numerous occasions due to the content of some of his novels, mainly The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Cain, in which he uses satire and biblical quotations to present the figure of God in a comical way.

The Portuguese government lambasted his 1991 novel O 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. Following the Swedish Academy's decision to present Saramago with the Nobel 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."

Saramago was a member of the Communist Party of Portugal, Saramago was also a candidate of the Democratic Unity Coalition in all elections of the European Parliament from 1989 to 2009, though he ran for positions of which it was thought he had no possibility of winning. His political engagement has led to comparisons with George Orwell.

When speaking to The Observer in 2006, Saramago said he "believe 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."

During the Second Intifada, while visiting Ramallah in March 2002, Saramago said that "what is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz ... A sense of impunity characterises the Israeli people and its army. They have turned into rentiers of the Holocaust." 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." Critics of these statements charged that they were antisemitic. 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."

During the 2006 Lebanon War, Saramago joined Tariq 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".

He was also a supporter of Iberian Federalism. In a 2008 press conference for the filming of Blindness he asked, in reference to the Great 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."

Awards and accolades 1995: Camões Prize 1998: Nobel Prize in Literature 2004: America Award 2009: São Paulo Prize for Literature — Shortlisted in the Best Book of the Year category for A Viagem do Elefante

Nobel Prize in Literature

José Saramago (right) and the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Ivo Andrić pictured on a 2022 Serbian stamp. The Swedish Academy selected Saramago as the 1998 recipient of the Nobel 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.

In 2024, Saramago's widow Pilar del Rio and the José Saramago Foundation donated a number of Saramago's belongings to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, including a pair of his glasses, a stone found in Lanzarote he kept at his home, and a manuscript written in his youth.

Decorations

The José Saramago Foundation The José Saramago Foundation was founded by José Saramago in June 2007, with the aim to defend and spread the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the promotion of culture in Portugal just like in all the countries, and protection of the environment. The José Saramago Foundation is located in the historic Casa dos Bicos in the city of Lisbon.

List of works