Jose Saramago, the first ever Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. passed away on 18 June. He was 87.
Saramago was born in 1922 into a peasant family in Azinhaga, a village in Ribatejo, northeast of Lisbon. When he was two, they moved to the capital, where his father |ose, an artilleryman in the first work! war, found a job as a traffic policeman and his mother worked as a domestic cleaner. After the 1926 coup d’etat overthrew the republic, Antonio de Salazar rose to power with his fascist militias and P1DE secret police. “Small Memories”, Saramago’s memoir, describes his family’s sordid living conditions in Lisbon and hints at a coercive submission within the household to the fascist slogan of “God, Fatherland, Family”.
Shortly after the family moved to Lisbon, his elder brother Francisco died, aged four. Saramago’s efforts to track down his grave some 70 years later, while collecting information for his memoir, fed his novel “All the Names”. Since his family could not afford to keep him at grammar school, he went to vocational school and became an apprentice mechanic in a garage. Yet he read “at random” in public libraries, and worked at a publishing company in the mid-1950s. He translated Tolstoy, Baudelaire and Hegel among others, before becoming a journalist.
His first novel was published when he was 23. Then there were thirty years of silence. Meanwhile, in 1969 he joined the underground Portuguese Communist Parry in 1969 – the main opposition to the dictatorship risking jail and assault. After the Carnation revolution of 1974 toppled Salazar’s successor, Marcelo Caetano, Saramago became deputy editor of the revolutionary daily newspaper Diariode Noticias.
But in 1975, a counter-coup overthrew Portugal’s Communist-led revolution of the previous year, and Mr. Saramago was fired from his job. Overnight, along with other prominent leftists, he became virtually unemployable. “It was the best luck of my life,” he said in a 2007 interview. “It drove me to become a writer.” After working variously as a garage mechanic, a welfare agency bureaucrat, a printing production manager, a proofreader, a translator and a newspaper columnist, he finally became a full-time writer only in his late 50s.
“The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,” regarded as his masterpiece, is his only novel to deal directly with the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Set in 1936 in a Europe darkened by the ascendancies of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar, the book tells the story of a doctor and poet living in Brazil who returns to fascist Lisbon when he hears of the death of his friend Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s great modernist poet.
His novel “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” in which Jesus on the cross apologizes to mankind for God’s sins, was deemed “corruscatingly blasphemous” by some believers and deeply religious by others. When the Portuguese government^ under pressure from the Catholic Church, blocked its entry for a European Literary Prize in 1992, Mr. Saramago chose to go into exile.setting up residence in the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession.
In 1998 the Nobel committee praised his “parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony”, and his “modern scepticism” about official truths.
In his later years, Mr. Saramago’s fiction became more starkly allegorical. In novels like “Blindness,” in which an entire city is struck by a plague of sightlessness that reduces most of its citizens to barbarism, readers have found a powerful parable about the fragility of human civilization.
His fabie of consumerism and control in globalised culture, The Cave (2001), shows the focus oflife shifting from cathedral to shopping mall. But for Jull Costa, its strength is in his “writing so humanely about ordinary people and their predicaments”.
In “Seeing” [2004), set later on in the same country as Blindness, the majority cast blank ballots in a protest that leads to a state of emergency. For Saramago, democracy was in need of regeneration, since economic power determines political power.
In a 2008 interview, Saramago described himself as a “hormonal communist – just as there’s a hormone that makes my beard grow every day. I don’t make excuses for what communist regimes have done – the church has done a lot of wrong things, burning people at the stake. But I have the right to keep my ideas. I’ve found nothing better.”
In later years, Mr. Saramago used his status as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.