Jose Saramago

Jose de Sousa Saramago was born on November 16, 1922, in Azinhaga, a small village in the Ribatejo region of central Portugal, about a hundred kilometres northeast of Lisbon. His parents, Jose de Sousa and Maria da Piedade, were landless agricultural labourers. The surname Saramago, a Portuguese word for wild radish, was a family nickname that a village registrar added to the birth record on his own initiative, and it stuck ^[1].

When the boy was about two years old the family moved to Lisbon, where his father found work as a policeman. Money remained short, and Saramago later recalled spending long stretches of his childhood back in Azinhaga with his maternal grandparents, Jeronimo and Josefa, illiterate pig keepers whose storytelling he credited as an early literary education. His elder brother Francisco died in 1924, a loss that marked the family deeply ^[2].

Although he was a strong student, his parents could not afford to keep him in an academic secondary school. He transferred to a technical school and trained as a mechanic, a trade he practised for roughly two years after graduating. In the evenings he read whatever he could find in a Lisbon public library, since the household owned no books of its own until he bought one, on credit, at the age of nineteen ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Jose Saramago before fame arrived would have found a man moving between modest jobs: mechanic, civil servant in the social welfare services, and later production manager at a Lisbon publishing house, Estudios Cor. He published a first novel, Terra do Pecado (Land of Sin), in 1947, when he was twenty-four. It attracted little notice, and a second manuscript found no publisher. Discouraged, he wrote almost nothing for publication for nearly two decades ^[2].

He returned to print in 1966 with a volume of poetry, Os Poemas Possiveis, and through the late 1960s and 1970s worked as a translator and as a journalist, writing columns and serving as an editor at the newspaper Diario de Lisboa. In 1969 he joined the Portuguese Communist Party, then illegal under the Salazar dictatorship, and he remained a member for the rest of his life ^[3].

After the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 toppled the regime, Saramago briefly held the post of deputy director at the newspaper Diario de Noticias. He was dismissed in late 1975 amid the political reversals that followed, and he later described that dismissal as the push that made him commit fully to literature. His breakthrough came with Levantado do Chao (Raised from the Ground, 1980), a novel about three generations of Alentejo farm labourers, in which he first deployed the unbroken, orally inflected sentences that became his signature ^[1][3].

The novel that made Saramago's international reputation was Memorial do Convento (1982), published in English as Baltasar and Blimunda, a story set during the eighteenth-century construction of the Mafra convent that mixes historical detail with a flying machine and a seer's gifts. It won wide praise in Portugal and abroad and was later adapted by the Italian composer Azio Corghi as the opera Blimunda ^[2]. He followed it with The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), which imagines one of Fernando Pessoa's poetic alter egos returning to Lisbon in 1936, and with The Stone Raft (1986), in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from Europe and drifts into the Atlantic ^[1].

Controversy arrived with O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, 1991), a retelling of the life of Jesus that angered the Catholic Church. In 1992 the Portuguese government, invoking religious sensitivities, removed the book from the national shortlist for a European literary prize. Saramago regarded the act as censorship, and in protest he and his wife moved to Lanzarote in Spain's Canary Islands, where he lived for the rest of his life ^[3][4].

Among the central Jose Saramago achievements of the following decade was Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness, 1995), an allegory in which an unnamed city is struck by an epidemic of white blindness and social order collapses. The novel became his most widely read book and was filmed in 2008 by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, with Julianne Moore in the lead role ^[5]. In October 1998 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony. He was the first writer in the Portuguese language to receive the award ^[4]. He had already won the Camoes Prize, the most important literary honour of the Portuguese-speaking world, in 1995 ^[2].

Saramago married Ilda Reis, a typist who later became a recognised engraver, in 1944. Their daughter Violante, his only child, was born in 1947, the same year as his first novel. The marriage ended in divorce in 1970, and for more than a decade afterwards he shared his life with the writer Isabel da Nobrega ^[2].

In 1986 he met Pilar del Rio, a Spanish journalist from Seville who had sought him out for an interview. They married in 1988, and she became the Spanish translator of his books and his closest collaborator. After the couple settled in Lanzarote in 1993, their home and its library grew into a cultural site in its own right, later opened to visitors as A Casa Jose Saramago ^[6].

His politics were inseparable from his public identity. He remained a communist without apology, describing himself as a hormonal communist, and he was equally frank about his atheism. These convictions fed running disputes with the Vatican, with Portuguese governments, and, after his 2002 remarks comparing conditions in Ramallah to Auschwitz, with many critics of his statements on Israel. He never softened his positions, arguing that a writer had the same duty as any citizen to speak plainly ^[3][4].

Fame did not slow his output. After the Nobel, Saramago published at a steady pace: The Cave (2000), The Double (2002), Seeing (2004), a sequel of sorts to Blindness set in the same city, Death with Interruptions (2005), and The Elephant's Journey (2008), which follows an elephant walked from Lisbon to Vienna in 1551 ^[1][5].

In 2007 the Jose Saramago Foundation was established in Lisbon to safeguard his work and promote debate on human rights and culture; it is housed in the Casa dos Bicos, a sixteenth-century building near the Tagus riverfront. In his final years he also embraced new forms, keeping a widely read blog whose entries were collected in the volume published in English as The Notebook ^[6].

His health declined seriously in late 2007 with a respiratory illness from which he made a partial recovery, and he continued writing almost to the end, completing the short novel Cain, another provocation aimed at biblical narrative, in 2009. Saramago died at his home in Tias, Lanzarote, on June 18, 2010, at the age of eighty-seven. Portugal declared two days of national mourning, and thousands attended the funeral ceremonies in Lisbon, where his ashes were later buried beneath an olive tree brought from Azinhaga, outside the Casa dos Bicos ^[4][7].

Any Jose Saramago biography has to reckon with how unusual his career shape was: a major body of work built almost entirely after the age of fifty-five, in defiance of the usual arc of literary lives. Critics place him alongside the great allegorists of the twentieth century, and his novels have been translated into dozens of languages, with worldwide sales in the millions ^[1][5].

His formal innovations proved as influential as his plots. The long sentences, the dialogue folded into prose without quotation marks, and the ironic narrator who interrupts his own story have been absorbed by younger writers in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Among the basic Jose Saramago facts worth remembering is that he insisted this style simply reproduced the rhythms of spoken storytelling he had heard from his grandparents in Azinhaga ^[2][6].

Institutions keep the work in circulation. The Jose Saramago Foundation in Lisbon and the house museum in Lanzarote host readings, exhibitions, and school programmes, and the Camoes Prize and Nobel archives preserve the record of his honours. In 2022, the centenary of his birth prompted commemorations across the Portuguese-speaking world, new editions of his novels, and renewed argument about his politics, which is likely how he would have wanted it ^[6][7].