JOSé SARAMAGO

'José de Sousa Saramago', GColSE (pron. IPA []; born November 16, 1922) is a Nobel-laureate Portuguese writer, playwright and journalist. His works commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor rather than the official story. Some of his works can also be seen as allegories.
Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He currently lives on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain.

Contents

Biography

Literary themes

Family history

Style

Bibliography

See also

References

Bibliography

External links

Biography

Saramago was in his mid-fifties before he won international acclaim. It was the 1988 publication of his ''Baltasar and Blimunda'' that first brought him to the attention of an English-speaking 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]
He has also aroused controversy as a result of his outspoken opposition to Israel's actions in Palestine and Lebanon. 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 characterise as "a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation". In 2002 Saramago compared conditions in the West Bank with “Auschwitz.”
Saramago lives in Spain with his Spanish wife Pilar del Río, a journalist born in Seville in 1950.

Literary themes

Saramago’s novels often deal with fantastic scenarios, such as that in his 1986 novel, ''The Stone Raft'', where 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, or “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.
Using such imaginative themes, Saramago succinctly addresses the most serious of subject matter with boundless wit and keen insight. His greatest asset as an author is his 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 with their need for individuality, and to find meaning and dignity outside of political and economic structures. Harold Bloom has stated that he considers José Saramago the "most gifted novelist alive in the world today".

Family history

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 language as wild radish, was his father's family's nickname, which got 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. Although Saramago was a good pupil, his parents were unable to afford to keep him attending a grammar school, moving him to a technical school at age 12; after finishing school, he worked as a car mechanic for two years. Later he worked as a translator, then as a journalist, and finally 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.

Style

Saramago tends to write long sentences, often more than a page long. He uses periods sparingly, choosing instead a loose flow of clauses joined by commas. Many of his paragraphs match the length of some authors' chapters. He uses no quotation marks to delimit dialog; when the speaker changes Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's clause. In his novels ''Blindness'' and ''The Cave'', Saramago sometimes abandons the use of proper nouns; indeed, the difficulty of naming is a recurring theme in his work.

Bibliography

Title	Year	English title	Year	ISBN
''Terra do Pecado''	1947
''Os Poemas Possíveis''	1966
''Provavelmente Alegria''	1970
''Deste Mundo e do Outro''	1971
''A Bagagem do Viajante''	1973
''As Opiniões que o DL teve''	1974
''O Ano de 1993''	1975
''Os Apontamentos''	1976
''Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia''	1977	''Manual of Painting and Calligraphy''	1993	ISBN 1857540433
''Objecto Quase''	1978
''Levantado do Chão''	1980
''Viagem a Portugal''	1981	''Journey to Portugal''	2000	ISBN 0151005877
''Memorial do Convento''	1982	''Baltasar and Blimunda''	1987	ISBN 0151105553
''O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis''	1986	''The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis''	1991	ISBN 0151997357
''A Jangada de Pedra''	1986	''The Stone Raft''	1994	ISBN 0151851980
''História do Cerco de Lisboa''	1989	''The History of the Siege of Lisbon''	1996	ISBN 015100238X
''O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo''	1991	''The Gospel According to Jesus Christ''	1993	ISBN 0151367000
''Ensaio sobre a Cegueira''	1995	''Blindness''	1997	ISBN 0151002517
''Todos os Nomes''	1997	''All the Names''	1999	ISBN 0151004218
''O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida''	1997	''The Tale of the Unknown Island''	1999	ISBN 0151005958
''A Caverna''	2001	''The Cave''	2002	ISBN 0151004145
''O Homem Duplicado''	2003	''The Double''	2004	ISBN 0151010404)
''Ensaio sobre a Lucidez''	2004	''Seeing''	2006	ISBN 0151012385
''Don Giovanni ou o Dissoluto Absolvido''	2005
''As Intermitências da Morte''	2005
''As Pequenas Memórias''	2006

See also

★ Doppelgänger

References

1. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1998/bio-bibl.html Nobel Prize citation, 1998
2. The God Factor
3. Prophet of Doom
4. Shadows on the Wall

Bibliography

★ Baptista Bastos, ''José Saramago : Aproximação a um retrato'', Dom Quijote, 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 essencial sobre José Saramago'', Imprensa Nacional, 1987

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

★ Saramago Autobiography on Nobel Prize site

★ José Saramago from Pegasos

★ Translation of interview with Saramago in El País - 12-Nov-2005