Stephen Moss
Jos Saramago has finally received his due from the Swedish Academy. Awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, he is the first writer in Portuguese to win the world’s most prestigious literary award. “I am very happy for myself,” he told a cheering crowd at the Frankfurt Book Fair. “But I am also happy for my country.”
Portugal’s former president, Mario Soares, who now acts as a cultural ambassador for his country, said: “I think it is finally an act of justice.” Saramago (75) has been tipped to win in previous years and was disappointed not to have won last year, when the prize went to Dario Fo.
The Swedish Academy, in the fanciful language for which it is famous, said it had awarded the prize, worth just under $1-million, to Saramago for work that, “with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony, continually enables us to apprehend an illusory reality”.
Saramago’s breakthrough came in 1982, with the novel Baltasar and Blimunda, a fantasy rooted in the 18th century but satirising the power politics of contemporary Portugal. His novels, which include The Stone Raft, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Blindness, have been translated into more than 25 languages.
“He is the grand old man of Portuguese letters and has been a contender for the Nobel for years,” said Guido Waldman, editorial director at Harvill, his principal British publisher. “A lot of people were wondering why he had been bypassed.
“He is a very Portuguese writer, concerned to establish Portugal’s identity as part of mainstream European culture, not just a little outcrop of the Spanish peninsula. He’s a careful writer and his novels are very densely written.”
“Without a doubt he is the greatest Iberian novelist of the century,” said Michael Schmidt, editorial director of Carcanet, which published Saramago when he first came to prominence in the mid-1980s. “He is a very readable novelist – but he is also very experimental. He is extremely difficult to translate, because he doesn’t write in that literary Esperanto favoured by most of today’s European novelists.
“He is very hostile to the church, and there is still a communist strain in his work. He is very hostile to accumulations of power. He grew up under [dictator Antnio] Salazar and in a church-dominated environment, and he has reacted against that. He is a Marxist liberal, interested in resistance and the emergence of the self.”
Saramago’s first novel, Country of Sin, was published in 1947. He was unable to publish for many years because of his status as a dissident during the Salazar dictatorship. Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), won him a string of literary prizes and brought him to international attention.
Saramago joined the Communist Party in 1969, when it was illegal under Portugal’s dictatorship, but has been critical of both the party and its ideology. His involvement in politics led to a brief stint on the Lisbon city council. “I am a writer who intervenes in politics sometimes,” he said.
His lyrical style, weaving together fantasy, Portuguese history and attacks on political repression and poverty, has led to comparisons with Latin American writers such as the former Nobel winner Gabriel Garca Mrquez. But Saramago denies that there is an influence and says old masters such as Miguel de Cervantes and Nicolai Gogol have left more of an impression.
This year’s prize has been shrouded in the usual secrecy and controversy. The 18-strong academy, based in Stockholm, has been divided ever since three members walked out over policy, including its refusal publicly to support Salman Rushdie over the fatwa. Sture Allen, the academy’s permanent secretary, this year faced disapproval over his handling of the selection procedure.
Saramago’s Nobel did not meet with universal acclaim. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano described him as “an unreconstructed communist” and said the choice was “yet another ideologically slanted award”.