José Saramago
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2008-07-11T14:13:44Z
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{{Infobox Writer <!-- for more information see [[:Template:Infobox Writer/doc]] -->
| name = José Saramago{{click|image=Nobel medal dsc06171.jpg|link=Nobel Prize in Literature|width=20px|height=20px}}
| image = Josesaramago.jpg
| imagesize = 220px
| caption =
| pseudonym =
| birthname = José de Sousa Saramago
| birthdate = {{birth date and age|1922|11|16|mf=y}}
| birthplace = [[Azinhaga]], [[Ribatejo]], [[Portugal]]
| deathdate =
| deathplace =
| occupation = [[Playwright]], [[Novelist]]
| nationality = [[Portugal]]
| period = [[1947]]–present
| genre =
| subject =
| movement =
| awards = {{awd|[[Nobel Prize in Literature]]|1998}}
| notableworks = [[Baltasar and Blimunda]], [[The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis]], [[Blindness (novel)|Blindness]], [[The Gospel According to Jesus Christ]]
| influences =
| influenced =
| website =
}}
'''José de Sousa Saramago''', <small>[[Order of St. James of the Sword|GColSE]]</small> ({{pronounced|ʒuˈzɛ sɐɾɐˈmagu}}; born [[November 16]], [[1922]]) is a [[Nobel Prize for Literature|Nobel-laureate]] [[Portugal|Portuguese]] [[writer]], [[playwright]] and [[journalist]]. His works, some of which can be seen as [[allegories]], commonly present [[subversive]] perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor rather than the officially sanctioned story.
Saramago was awarded the [[Nobel Prize for literature]] in 1998. He founded the National Front for the Defense of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with among others [[Freitas-Magalhaes]]. He currently lives on [[Lanzarote]] in the [[Canary Islands]], [[Spain]].
==Biography==
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 as the [[wild radish]], was his father's family's nickname, and was 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 in grammar school, and instead moved him to a technical school at age 12. After graduating, he worked as a car mechanic for two years. Later he worked as a translator, then as a journalist. He was assistant editor of the newspaper ''[[Diário de Notícias]]'', a position he had to leave after the political events in 1975. After a period of working as a translator he was able to support himself 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 [[Spain|Spanish]] journalist Pilar del Río, who is the official translator of his books into Spanish.
José Saramago was in his mid-fifties before he won international acclaim; his publication of ''[[Baltasar and Blimunda]]'' brought him to the attention of an international readership. This novel won the Portuguese PEN Club Award.
Saramago has been a member of the [[Portuguese Communist Party]] since 1969, <ref>http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1998/bio-bibl.html Nobel Prize citation, 1998</ref> as well as an [[atheist]]<ref>[http://www.plcs.umassd.edu/plcs7texts/monteiro.doc The God Factor]</ref> and self-described [[pessimist]].<ref>[http://web.archive.org/web/20021031062736/http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue25/saramago.shtml Langer, Adam. "José Saramago: Prophet of Doom." ''Book Magazine'' November/December 2002.]</ref> His views have aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of ''[[The Gospel According to Jesus Christ]]''.<ref>[http://www.yalereviewofbooks.com/archive/winter03/review12.shtml.htm Austin, Paige. "Shadows on the Wall." ''The Yale Review of Books'' Spring 2004.]</ref> Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus Christ as a fallible human being. Portugal's conservative government would not allow Saramago's work to compete for the European Literary Prize, arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result, Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Canaries. <ref>[http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1998/saramago-autobio.html "José Saramago: Autobiography." ''Nobelprize.org''. 1998. Nobelprize.org. 25 September 2007.]</ref>
Saramago has also aroused controversy ostensibly as a result of his opposition to [[Israel]]'s actions in [[Palestine]] and [[Lebanon]]. In 2002, he wrote in El Pais, the international Spanish-language paper of record, that Israel brutalizes Palestinians because of Judaism itself.
<blockquote>
Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: 'Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.' Israel wants all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust; Israel wants us to renounce the most elemental critical judgment and for us to transform ourselves into a docile echo of its will.
<ref>[http://www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/bigotry_in_print.htm "Bigotry in Print. Crowds Chant Murder. Something's Changed." Paul Berman, The Forward, 2002.]</ref></blockquote>
During the [[2006 Lebanon War]], he signed [http://www.chomsky.info/letters/20060719.htm a statement] together with [[Tariq Ali]], [[John Berger]], [[Noam Chomsky]], [[Eduardo Galeano]], [[Naomi Klein]], [[Harold Pinter]], [[Arundhati Roy]] and [[Howard Zinn]], condemning what they characterize as "a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation".
==Literary themes==
[[Image:Jose Saramago-Sep2006.jpg|thumb|200px|Jose Saramago in San Sebastián International Film Festival (holding the Persian translation of his book, [[Blindness (novel)|Blindness]])]]
Saramago’s novels often deal with fantastic [[scenario]]s, such as that in his 1986 novel, ''[[The Stone Raft]]'', wherein the [[Iberian Peninsula]] breaks off from the rest of Europe and sails about the [[Atlantic Ocean]]. In his 1995 novel, ''[[Blindness (novel)|Blindness]]'', an entire unnamed country is stricken with a mysterious plague of “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 (literature)|heteronym]] survives for a year after the poet himself dies.
Using such imaginative themes, Saramago succinctly addresses the most serious of subject matters with [[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 also 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".
==Style==
Saramago's experimental style often features long sentences, at times 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 entire chapters by more traditional writers. 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 (novel)|''Blindness'']] and [[The Cave (novel)|''The Cave'']], Saramago sometimes abandons the use of proper nouns; indeed, the difficulty of naming is a recurring theme in his work.
== Bibliography ==
{|class="wikitable"
!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 (novel)|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 (novel)|The Cave]]'' ||2002|| ISBN 0151004145
|-
|''O Homem Duplicado'' ||2003||''[[The Double (novel)|The Double]]'' ||2004|| ISBN 0151010404)
|-
|''Ensaio sobre a Lucidez'' ||2004||''[[Seeing (novel)|Seeing]]'' ||2006|| ISBN 0151012385
|-
|''Don Giovanni ou o Dissoluto Absolvido'' ||2005|| || ||
|-
|''As Intermitências da Morte'' ||2005||''[[Death at Intervals (novel)|Death at Intervals]]'' ||2008|| ISBN 1846550203
|-
|''As Pequenas Memórias'' ||2006||
|}
==See also==
* [[Magical Realism]]
==References==
{{reflist}}
=== Bibliography ===
* Baptista Bastos, ''José Saramago : Aproximação a um retrato'', Dom Quixote, 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 essential sobre José Saramago'', Imprensa Nacional, 1987
* "Saramago, José (1922-)." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Ed. Tracie Ratiner. Vol. 25. 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005. Discovering Collection. Thomson Gale. University of Guelph. 25 Sep. 2007.
==External links==
* [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26saramago-t.html The Unexpected Fantasist], a portrait of José Saramago, written by [[Fernanda Eberstadt]] and published August 26, 2007 in [[The New York Times Magazine]]
* [http://www.radiocable.com/heroes Introduction and video of Saramago from "Heroes de los dos bandos" -spanish civil war-]
* [http://www.xpress.es/radiocable/entre-saramago.htm Interviews with Saramago in video]
* [http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/saramago.htm José Saramago from Pegasos]
* [http://zenitservices.com/Translations/2005/Saramago.html Translation of interview with Saramago in El País - 12-Nov-2005]
* [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1998/lecture-e.html Saramago's Nobel Lecture]
* [http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=927 Societies of Mutual Isolation], an essay on Saramago by [[Benjamin Kunkel]] from [[Dissent]]
*[http://www.movietrailerlive.com/ct_0005_BlindnessCC Official Alliance Atlantis trailer for Blindness]
{{José Saramago}}
{{Nobel Prize in Literature Laureates 1976-2000}}
<!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] -->
{{Persondata
|NAME= Saramago, José de Sousa
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
|SHORT DESCRIPTION= Portuguese [[Playwright]], [[Novelist]]
|DATE OF BIRTH= [[November 16]], [[1922]]
|PLACE OF BIRTH= [[Azinhaga]], [[Ribatejo]], [[Portugal]]
|DATE OF DEATH=
|PLACE OF DEATH=
}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Saramago, José}}
[[Category:Portuguese dramatists and playwrights]]
[[Category:Portuguese novelists]]
[[Category:Nobel laureates in Literature]]
[[Category:Portuguese Nobel laureates]]
[[Category:Portuguese Communist Party members]]
[[Category:Magic realism writers]]
[[Category:Portuguese atheists]]
[[Category:1922 births]]
[[Category:Living people]]
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