José Saramago
Born	José de Sousa Saramago 16 November 1922 (1922-11-16) (age 87) Azinhaga, Ribatejo, Portugal
Occupation	Playwright, Novelist
Nationality	Portuguese
Writing period	1947–present
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1998
Official website

This is a Portuguese name; the family name is Sousa Saramago.

José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE (Portuguese pronunciation: [ʒuˈzɛ sɐɾɐˈmaɡu]; born 16 November 1922) is a Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor. Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He founded the National Front for the Defense of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with Freitas-Magalhães among others. He currently lives on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain.

[edit] 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. He spent vacations with his grandparents in a village called 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 good-bye 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." 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 had 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,^[1] as well as an atheist^[2] and self-described pessimist.^[3] His views have aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.^[4] Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus as a fallible human being. Portugal's conservative government would not 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.^[5]

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".^[6] He stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for the European Parliament in the 2009 election.^[7]

[edit] Literary themes

Saramago at San Sebastián International Film Festival (holding the Persian translation of his book, Blindness)

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. Additionally, his novel Death with Interruptions (also translated as Death at Intervals) centers around a country in which nobody dies over the course of seven months beginning on New Year's Day, and how the country reacts to the spiritual and political implications of the event.

Using such imaginative themes, Saramago 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. Literary critic Harold Bloom considers Saramago the second greatest living novelist in the world, behind only Philip Roth, but criticized his comparison of conditions in the Palestinian territories to the Auschwitz concentration camp and referred to Saramago as a "Portuguese Stalinist".^[8]

[edit] 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 extend for pages without pausing for dialog, which Saramago chooses not to delimit by quotation marks; when the speaker changes, Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's clause. In his novel Blindness, Saramago completely abandons the use of proper nouns instead choosing to refer to characters simply by some unique characteristic, an example of his use of style to enhance the recurring themes of identity and meaning found throughout his work.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] See also

• Magical realism

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

• Baptista Bastos, José Saramago : Aproximação a um retrato, Dom Quixote, 1996
• T.C. Cerdeira da Silva, Entre a história e aficção : 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
• Carlos Reis, Diálogos com José Saramago, Ed. Caminho, Lisboa, 1998
• M. Maria Seixo, O essential sobre José Saramago, Imprensa Nacional, 1987
• "Saramago, José (1922-)." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Ed. Tracie Ratiner. Vol. 25. 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005. Discovering Collection. Thomson Gale. University of Guelph. 25 Sep. 2007.

[edit] External links

• The Unexpected Fantasist, a portrait of José Saramago, written by Fernanda Eberstadt and published August 26, 2007 in The New York Times Magazine
• Introduction and video of Saramago from "Heroes de los dos bandos" -spanish civil war-
• Interviews with Saramago in video
• José Saramago from Pegasos
• Translation of interview with Saramago in El País - 12-Nov-2005
• Saramago's Nobel Lecture
• Societies of Mutual Isolation, an essay on Saramago by Benjamin Kunkel from Dissent
• Jose Saramago's blog.