Jose Saramago
When Jose Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, the Mayor of Lisbon placed billboards throughout the city congratulating him. It was the consecration of a Portuguese, an internationally acclaimed figure of the words, and a controversial thinker. The man who came from the country, a mere mechanic, and who published his first novel in 1947, was now an intellectual celebrity. But perhaps Saramago is still working on his biggest masterpiece: his own life made of struggles and overcoming adversities.
A difficult life
Jose Saramago was born in 1922, in a village called Azinhaga, in the countryside region of Ribatejo, Portugal. His parents were poor, landless peasants. As he recounts in his autobiography in Les Prix Nobel, the surname Saramago was given to him by mistake: “José de Sousa would have been my own name had not the Registrar, on his own initiative added the nickname by which my father’s family was known in the village: Saramago. I should add that saramago is a wild herbaceous plant, whose leaves in those times served at need as nourishment for the poor. Not until the age of seven, when I had to present an identification document at primary school, was it realized that my full name was José de Sousa Saramago…”
When Saramago was two years old, his father got a job as a policeman in Lisbon, and so the family moved to the capital. It was there that his older brother Francisco died, and the family kept on struggling to survive, living in shared houses with other families. Saramago was already a teenager when, finally, the family moved into their own house. The financial difficulties kept on threatening Saramago and his parents, even as his father’s job as a policeman had improved their living conditions. He was an exceptional student at school, but his parents couldn’t afford to pay for his studies. Saramago left the grammar school and went to a technical school to learn a craft. He would become a car mechanic, and work in a car shop in Lisbon.
The making of a Nobel Prize winner
The young Saramago never gave up on what he really liked: reading. When he was finished at the car shop, he would go to the library and spend the evenings reading. That, and the fact that he was fluent in French, would help him later on to work as a translator. One of Saramago life’s traits is the diversity of jobs he took, while he struggled as a writer: from a car mechanic, he became a civil servant; from there, he worked as a journalist, as a translator, as a blue-collar worker in a metal factory, and as a production manager at a publisher house.
Nevertheless, he published his first novel in 1947, titled The Land of Sin. In that year, his only daughter, Violante, was born. After this book, he started writing a new one, but he couldn’t even begin the story. So, in his very peculiar way, Saramago decided that he would only write again when he felt he had something interesting to say – it was a hiatus of 19 years until Possible Poems was written. Between 1970 and 1973, Saramago would only write and publish poetry, and a collection of newspaper articles. He devoted himself to the craft of journalism with a wisp of political criticism of the dictatorial regime, until he was fired in 1975. He would embrace writing novels as a full-time job when the counter-coup of the 25th of November 1975 led him out of the Diario de Noticias, one of Portugal’s national newspapers. Saramago was a communist militant, and at the time, he was penalized for his political sympathies, a situation which would repeat itself in different occasions.
He isolated himself in a village in the region of Alentejo, and from there, his work and peculiar writing style gained form until he became famous internationally. His most famous novels were written in the 1980s: Baltazar and Blimunda (1982), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) and The Stone Raft (1986). The world would recognize his work when Saramago was already in his mid-fifties.
The themes and the style
Saramago is usually associated with the literary current of Magic Realism, in which writers such as Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are included as well. He writes about the struggle of the average Joe against strange and unexpected adversities, telling allegories rather than stories, and instilling controversy. An example is the novel The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula separates itself physically from Europe, and roams around the oceans with Portugal and Spain in it, forcing both countries to unite. Saramago defends that Spain and Portugal should unite as one country, despite the fact that there are serious rivalries between both nations, especially in the economical scope.
He sets himself apart as a writer from Allende and Garcia Marquez in his writing style, a peculiar one that has been known to scare readers away, and paradoxically, attract hundreds more: the absence of punctuation marks and proper noun using. A Saramago sentence can last indefinitely, using only commas for pages on end.
When he writes his characters’ dialogues, Saramago doesn’t identify them as dialogues; he capitalizes the first letter of his character’s dialogue and that’s it. This style of writing, difficult for the reader, is a graphical option that makes his writing one of a kind. It is actually possible that this stems from the fact that Saramago was initially more of a poet than a novelist. In poetry, the form is freer, and the writer may have decided to use this freedom in his prose.
A controversial thinker
Saramago’s fling with irritating the established thinking is also one of his traits. His affiliation with the communist ideals didn’t make his life easy in Portugal, especially during the Salazar regime, which supported the ideologies of fascism. And neither his writing is free of controversy: in 1991, he published the acclaimed The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a novel that cause quite a stir in the Catholic minds of the country. Around that time, he was planning to present it at the European Literary Prize, but the center-right wing government vetoed his presence at the event, claiming that the contents of the novel offended Catholicism. Saramago reacted by moving to Spain, namely to the island of Lanzarote, with his second wife, Pilar del Rio. From there, she translates his works from Portuguese to Spanish, and he has been writing The Lanzarote Diaries, going now in five volumes.
His public statements about the Israel and Palestine conflict are also controversial, especially because Saramago has no problems saying what he feels, no matter the consequences. In 2006, he signed a statement alongside authors such as Noam Chomsky and Harold Pinter, against the war in Lebanon, considering it another act of Israel with the intent of eliminating the Palestinian State.
Nevertheless, his books and his attitude are admired all over the world. Saramago’s works have been translated into every possible language imaginable, and two movies have been based on his novels: The Stone Raft was adapted in 2002 by George Sluizer, and Hollywood has Blindness ready to be released, starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal and Sandra Oh, just to name a few of the leading actors.
At age 86, Jose Saramago put Portugal in the map of the literature world, and has created an impressive body of work that includes plays, poetry, novels and articles. He has also started a foundation with his name, and keeps on writing, after a lifetime of experience and struggle. Perhaps he is not controversial because he wants to be; he sees the world and understands it with the eyes of someone who has, after all, never forgotten the roots of a simple life.
>Written by d/visible contributor Mariana Passos E Sousa.
