🇵🇹 José Saramago

Jose de Sousa Saramago was born on November 16, 1922, in Azinhaga, a village in the Ribatejo region north of Lisbon. His family were rural laborers who owned no land. The name Saramago, a wild plant the poor sometimes ate, was a mocking nickname a registry clerk attached to the family and which Jose only discovered was officially his when he enrolled in school. The family soon moved to Lisbon, where he grew up in poverty.

He was a strong student but had to leave academic schooling for a technical school, then went to work, first as a mechanic, later as a metalworker. He read voraciously in public libraries at night. Over the following decades he worked as a translator, a literary editor, and a journalist. He published a novel in 1947 that went almost unnoticed, then essentially stopped publishing fiction for nearly twenty years.

His real career as a novelist began astonishingly late. In 1980, at fifty-seven, he published Levantado do Chao, Raised from the Ground, a novel about generations of Alentejo peasants in which he found his unmistakable voice: long, rolling sentences with minimal punctuation, dialogue folded into narration, marked only by commas and capital letters. It reads like a voice speaking, and it was a deliberate break with conventional form.

Then came the great run of books. Baltasar and Blimunda (1982) set a love story against the building of a vast convent and a dreamed flying machine in eighteenth-century Portugal. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) brought one of Pessoa's heteronyms back to a Lisbon shadowed by fascism. The Stone Raft imagined the Iberian Peninsula breaking off from Europe and drifting into the Atlantic. Each book mixed history, fable, and political argument.

In 1991 The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which portrayed a humane, doubting Jesus and an unsettling God, caused an uproar. The Portuguese government vetoed the book from a European literary prize, calling it offensive to Catholics. Saramago, an avowed atheist and communist, was furious. He left Portugal and settled on the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries with his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio, his translator and closest companion.

It was on Lanzarote that he wrote Blindness (1995), the novel most readers know. An unexplained epidemic of white blindness sweeps a city, and society collapses into squalor, cruelty, and improvised solidarity. It is a parable with no proper names, only the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with dark glasses, and it remains one of the most discussed novels of its era. The Nobel committee cited it when the prize was announced in 1998.

The Nobel did not soften him. He kept writing, and kept arguing, in newspaper columns and later a blog, against organized religion, against economic injustice, against political complacency, including in his own country and on the left. Late novels like All the Names, The Cave, and Death with Interruptions continued to test moral ideas through strange, simple premises. He published until the year of his death.

Saramago died on June 18, 2010, in Lanzarote, at eighty-seven. His ashes were divided between the island and Lisbon, where they rest beneath an olive tree brought from his native Azinhaga, near a museum in his name. He had come from people who owned nothing and left almost no trace in records, and he had made their world, and the moral questions of the whole modern world, the subject of literature read in dozens of languages.