José Saramago, who has died aged 87, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1998 and was Portugal’s most prolific and best-known 20th-century writer. More widely read in Europe and Australia than in North America, and printing in runs of 150 000 in Portugal and Brazil, these supposedly difficult and unarguably heavyweight works, on ponderous themes, have become major sellers.
Saramago once said: “If I had died when I was 60, I would have written nothing.” While this effectively glosses over his first major success in fiction, the novel, Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia (A Manual of Painting and Calligraphy) in 1977, and a number of volumes of poetry, plays and essays, there was little in Saramago’s background, or even his formative years and early career, to suggest a flowering of success at the age when many are contemplating retirement.
He was born into a humble rural household in the small village of Azinhaga, but the family moved to Lisbon when he was two and Saramago left school early to contribute to the household bills by working as a mechanic. Gradually, he progressed through many jobs towards his central literary interest.
He worked as a draughtsman, publisher’s reader and freelance translator, and in the editorial and production departments of a publishing house. He also worked on several newspapers, including a stint as a literary reviewer for Serra Nova and, after the death of the presidential dictator Antonio Salazar in 1970, as a political commentator on the Diário de Lisboa.
Political wranglings, and Saramago’s own uncompromised and uncompromising communism, were at least partly responsible for his being fired in 1975. The following year, he devoted himself exclusively to his books. “Being fired was the best luck of my life,” he said. “It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.”
He had, of course, been writing since his youth, but literature had seemed a pretentious option for a child from an illiterate background.
His first book, Terra do Pecado (Land of Sin), had been published in 1947, before he was 25, but it was not a success and has long been out of print (“to my relief”, he once commented). It took 20 years for him to venture into print again, not only for aesthetic reasons, but because his political sympathies naturally clashed with Salazar’s nationalistic views on culture.
Journalism was to remain a lifelong outlet for Saramago’s radical take on current events. He participated in campaigns and published his views on human rights abuses around the world. Meanwhile, his more personal writing underwent various sea changes. Between 1966 and 1976 he published all three volumes of his poetry. In the five years from 1971, Saramago also published four volumes of essays on a wide variety of topics. His earliest novels, appearing from the late 1970s, suffered (especially in the case of the Levantado do Chao — Rising from the Ground, 1980) from his desire to cram in as much politico-historical material as possible, in the manner of the “social conscience” novels of Émile Zola and Honoré de Balzac.
Gradually, he came to recognise that, for him, the genesis of his novels occurred best with the flash of an idea and then (oddly, perhaps) a name, and a literary category. Thus The Manual of Painting and Calligraphy: a Novel and his original title Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Essay on Blindness, 1995) which, to his extreme annoyance, was rendered in the 1997 English edition simply as Blindness. A sequel, Ensaio Sobre a Lucidez (Seeing), was published in 2004.
The writers he found himself most frequently compared with were Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and his compatriot, Fernando Pessoa (although Saramago was resistant to this type of pigeonholing). His first bestseller, O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984), was inspired by Ricardo Reis, one of the “heteronyms” whose identity Pessoa adopted as one of his half-dozen authorial identities.
Neither the then Portuguese minister of culture, who, in 1992 opposed Saramago’s nomination for the European Fiction Award, nor the Vatican, which opposed his Nobel award, condemning him (accurately) as “an unreconstructed communist”, appreciated Saramago’s concern with what they, too, should have been most concerned with: the problem of evil and the ecological and social imbalances wrought by human greed.
The novel, Blindness, which was filmed by Fernando Meirelles in 2008, was, after all, Saramago said, a metaphor for the way in which the richer nations pursue ever greater wealth to the continuing impoverishment of the already poor. The whole intricate parable, he suggested, could be summarised in the question: “Is a world in which fewer than 300 people own as much as the poorest 40% a great achievement?”
The magnitude of his themes never deterred Saramago. Many of his works start from a “What if … ?” reflex, leading from an apparently realistic premise to spectacular flights of imagination. Memorial do Convento (Baltasar and Blimunda, 1982), his first international bestseller, which was latterly transformed into the libretto for Azio Corghi’s opera Blimunda, opens under the Inquisition in 18th-century Portugal, but stars a woman endowed with witch-like clairvoyance and a priest who envisages the first successful flying machine.
A Jangada de Pedra (The Stone Raft, 1986) questions what would happen if Iberia detached from the Pyrenees and floated off across the Atlantic, shuddering to a halt somewhere between the former Portuguese colonies of Brazil and Angola.
The themes were philosophical and, increasingly, millennial. Todos os Nomes (All the Names, 1997) and La Caverna (The Cave, 2002) both dealt with the increasing loss of individuality brought about by bureaucracy.
Saramago recently wrote a charming memoir (As Pequenas Memorias — Small Memories, 2006). I translated a few his works of non-fiction — he was always courteous and generous to his translators, saying: “Lamentably, I can only write Portuguese. It is my translators who render my work universal.”
One, A Voyage to Portugal (2000), described his rediscovery of his homeland after decades of exile, exploring every region away from the tourist track and close to his heart. The other, The Notebook (2010), was a series of blogs, more often in fact essays, articles and a few rants — against Israel, fundamentalism, George Bush and Silvio Berlusconi — covering the year from September 2008 to August 2009.
There are still two more treats to come in English: the phenomenal part-historical, part-folkorical Elephant’s Journey (A Viagem do Elefante) will be out this August and Cain (Caim) next year.
Although he had a daughter, Violante, from his first marriage, Saramago regarded his books as his offspring. He defended them vigorously and received his increasing avalanche of awards, doctorates and prizes as their due.
Divorced from his first wife, Ilda Reis, in 1988 he married the Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio. In 1992, after the furore that greeted O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, 1991), they moved to Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands.
Pilar and Violante survive him. —