Historical Figure
José Saramago
1922–2010
Portuguese novelist (1922–2010)
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Biography
José de Sousa Saramago 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."
Timeline
The story of José Saramago, told in moments.
Published his first novel at 25. Then wrote nothing for almost 20 years. Worked as a mechanic, translator, and journalist. Joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969.
Published Blindness, a novel about an epidemic of white blindness sweeping through an unnamed city. No character has a name. No quotation marks. Sentences run for pages. It sold millions.
Won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The first Portuguese-language writer to receive it. The Vatican newspaper called his selection "objectionable." Saramago was a lifelong atheist and Communist.
Died at his home in Lanzarote, Canary Islands. Age 87. He'd moved there in 1992 after the Portuguese government censored his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
In Their Own Words (20)
Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.
Interview with Katherine Vaz, José Saramago, BOMB Magazine, June 2001., 2001
Destiny isn’t taken in by people trying to make what came first come afterwards.
p. 12 (Vintage 2003), 2000
The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife...
Referring to his grandfather, Jerónimo Meirinho., 1998
The question suddenly came into my head, 'And if we were all blind?' And then immediately, as if answering myself, 'But we are all blind.'
On the idea for his next novel (Blindness), which came to him while sitting in a restaurant; New York Times interview with Alan Riding (1998), as quoted in Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, 6th Edition (Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2001), p. 131., 1998
It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.
Interview Programa Jô Soares, 1997., 1997
Artifacts (15)
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