José Saramago (1922 - 2010) was a Portuguese novelist, playwright and journalist, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, the first writer in Portuguese to receive it. His novels, written in a distinctive style of long unpunctuated sentences and sceptical irony, include Baltasar and Blimunda, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Blindness. [1]
Early life
Saramago was born on 16 November 1922 in Azinhaga, a village in the Ribatejo province of Portugal, into a family of landless peasants. The family moved to Lisbon while he was an infant. Financial hardship ended his academic schooling, and he transferred to a technical school, training as a mechanic and working for some years in a garage. [2]
He educated himself in the public libraries of Lisbon and moved through a series of jobs, including administrative work and translation, before entering journalism. His first novel, Land of Sin, appeared in 1947, after which he published almost nothing for nearly two decades. [1]
Journalism and politics
Saramago joined the then-illegal Portuguese Communist Party in 1969, under the Estado Novo dictatorship, and remained a member for the rest of his life. After the Carnation Revolution of 1974 he served briefly as deputy director of the newspaper Diário de Notícias, losing the post in the political realignments of 1975. Unemployment at the age of fifty-three turned him to writing full time. [2]
Major work
His mature career began with Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (1977) and the rural chronicle Raised from the Ground (1980), in which he first used the prose style that became his signature: paragraphs of great length, dialogue embedded in the narrative without quotation marks, and a narrator who comments openly on the story. [1]
Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), set around the building of the convent at Mafra, brought him international attention, followed by The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), which imagines a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa returning to Lisbon, and The Stone Raft (1986), in which the Iberian Peninsula detaches from Europe and drifts into the Atlantic. [3]
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) provoked a confrontation with the Portuguese government, which withdrew the book from consideration for a European literary prize on grounds of religious offence. Saramago left Portugal in protest and settled on the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries, where he lived for the rest of his life. [2]
Blindness (1995), in which an unexplained epidemic of white blindness collapses the social order of an unnamed city, became his most widely read book. Later works include All the Names, The Cave, Seeing, Death with Interruptions and The Elephant's Journey. [4]
Later life and legacy
The Nobel Prize followed in 1998. He had earlier received the Camões Prize, the highest honour in Portuguese-language letters, and was later made a Grand Collar of the Military Order of Saint James of the Sword, alongside numerous honorary doctorates from universities across Europe and Latin America. [1]
Saramago remained a vocal political commentator, critical of neoliberal economics, the Catholic Church and the European Union's treatment of its periphery. He died at his home in Lanzarote on 18 June 2010. The José Saramago Foundation, established in Lisbon, administers his archive and awards a literary prize in his name. [2]
