José Saramago

Early years

José de Sousa Saramago was born on 16 November 1922 in Azinhaga, a small village in the Ribatejo region, about a hundred kilometres northeast of Lisbon and close to the River Tagus. His parents, José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade, were landless peasants with very few resources. That humble background shaped much of his work, both in his sympathy for rural labourers and in his political ideas, which drew on a formal education as well as on popular culture and lived experience.

Saramago was the nickname of his father's family, taken from a wild herbaceous plant of the cabbage family. According to the most common account, the village clerk entered it by mistake into the boy's name when he was registered, although some say a family acquaintance was playing a joke. The official record also gives 18 November as his birthday, though he was born on the 16th.

In 1924 the family moved to Lisbon, where his father found work as a police officer. A few months later his older brother Francisco died. Saramago spent holidays with his grandparents in Azinhaga, and he later remembered his grandfather, ill and about to be taken to the capital for treatment, going out into the yard to embrace the trees one by one, saying goodbye to them because he knew he would not return.

Education

At the age of twelve, in 1934, he enrolled in an industrial school. Although he was a good student, his parents could no longer afford to keep him in education. He trained as a mechanical locksmith and spent two years working in a car repair shop to support his family. Even so, technical schooling at the time still included humanities subjects, and through the free textbooks of those years he encountered the classics, some of which he could still recite from memory late in life.

In his spare time he began to use the public library in Lisbon, and reading became a lifelong habit that took the place of formal schooling. This self-directed education, combined with his experience of poverty, gave his writing its foundation.

Clerk and journalist

Shortly after marrying Ilda Reis in 1944, a typist who later took up painting, he began working as an administrative civil servant in the Social Security service. In 1947 he published his first novel, Terra do pecado, which went almost unnoticed and whose title was chosen by his publisher; the author later disowned it, and it was reissued in Spanish in 2021 under the title he had chosen. That same year his only daughter, Violante, was born.

For the next two decades he wrote almost no literature. He put it plainly: he simply had nothing to say, and when one has nothing to say the best thing is to keep quiet. He worked for an insurance company, contributed as a journalist to the Diário de Notícias, from which he was dismissed for political reasons. From 1966 he devoted himself entirely to writing. That year he published his first poetry collection, Os poemas possíveis, and between 1966 and 1969 he worked as an editor and translator of writers such as Maupassant, Tolstoy, Baudelaire and Colette.

In 1969 he joined the Portuguese Communist Party, then still clandestine, and in 1970 he divorced Ilda. Under Salazar's dictatorship he suffered censorship and persecution, an experience that sharpened his critical view of power.

Revolution and a personal voice

After the Carnation Revolution of 1974, which restored democracy to Portugal, Saramago became assistant director of the Diário de Notícias. The paper's editorial line grew clearly pro-communist, and after the coup of 25 November 1975 that brought an end to the revolutionary process, he was fired. He then devoted himself more seriously to writing and published a series of important works, including Manual de pintura e caligrafia (1977) and Objecto quase (1978).

His breakthrough came with Levantado do chão (1980), a portrait of several generations of peasants in the Alentejo in which he found his distinctive voice: a clean, almost poetic prose with long sentences, few full stops, and dialogue run into the paragraph without quotation marks. It was followed by Memorial do convento (1982), set in eighteenth-century Lisbon during the Inquisition and the building of the Mafra convent, which tells the love story of a maimed soldier and a clairvoyant woman. The novel reached an international readership when it appeared in English in 1988.

In 1984 he published The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa survives for a year after its creator's death, and in 1986 The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks away from Europe and sails into the Atlantic. That same year he met the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río, whom he married in 1988 and who became his official translator into Spanish until the end of his life.

Lanzarote and the Nobel Prize

The publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) provoked an unprecedented controversy in Portugal. The government of Aníbal Cavaco Silva prevented the book from competing for the European Literature Prize, arguing that it offended Catholics. In protest, Saramago moved with his wife to the Canary island of Lanzarote, which became his main home from then on, although he kept his ties to Lisbon.

From there he published works such as Blindness (1995), in which an epidemic of white blindness throws a city into chaos, and All the Names (1997), about a civil registry clerk who falls in love with the file of a woman he has never met. In 1998 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in the Portuguese language to win it. The Swedish Academy praised his parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony, and his modern scepticism towards official truths. The decision was well received abroad but attracted harsh criticism from the conservative press in his own country, and the Vatican described it as yet another ideologically slanted award.

Ideas, style and legacy

Saramago was a declared atheist and a libertarian communist. His work often uses fable, the absurd and satire to question institutions such as the Church, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, and to reflect on identity, solidarity and the dignity of people in the face of political and economic structures. His experimental style, with very long sentences and dialogue woven into the paragraph, has been praised for its precision and irony, and in some novels, such as Blindness, he went so far as to dispense with proper names.

Among his late works are Death with Interruptions (2005), about a country where nobody dies, The Elephant's Journey (2008) and Cain (2009). He died in Tías, on Lanzarote, on 18 June 2010, at the age of 87, from chronic leukaemia. The José Saramago Foundation, created in 2007, has since worked to preserve and spread his legacy, and his posthumous novel Claraboia, written in the 1950s, was published in 2011. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he is widely regarded as one of the major novelists of the twentieth century.