Everything about Jos Saramago totally explained
José de Sousa Saramago,
GColSE (; born
November 16,
1922) is 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 currently lives on
Lanzarote in the
Canary Islands,
Spain.
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'd 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. Since 1988, Saramago has been married to the
Spanish journalist Pilar del Río, who is the official translator of his books into Spanish.
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.
Saramago has been a member of the
Portuguese Communist Party since 1969, as well as an
atheist and self-described
pessimist. His views have 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 wouldn't 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 has 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. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: 'Vengeance is mine, and I'll be repaid.' Israel wants all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust; Israel wants us to renounce the most elemental critical judgment and for us to transform ourselves into a docile echo of its will.
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 characterize 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.
Harold Bloom has stated that he considers José Saramago the "most gifted novelist alive in the world today".
Style
Saramago's experimental style often features long sentences, at times more than a page long. He uses 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 uses no quotation marks to delimit dialog; when the speaker changes Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's clause. In his novels
Blindness and
The Cave, Saramago sometimes abandons the use of proper nouns; indeed, the difficulty of naming is a recurring theme in his work.
Bibliography
Further Information
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