Jose Saramago Biography and List of Works

Portuguese writer, who's panoramic works view European existence within an artistic framework that melds myth, history, and fiction. Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998. According to the Swedish Academy, Saramago "with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again apprehend an elusory reality".

"In one sense it could even be said that, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page, book after book, I have been successively implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe that without them I wouldn't be the person I am today; without them maybe my life wouldn't have succeeded in becoming more than an inexact sketch, a promise that like so many others remained only a promise, the existence of someone who maybe might have been but in the end could not manage to be."
(from Nobel Lecture, 1998)

José Saramago was born in Azinhaga, in the province of Ribatejo. He was forced to abandon school in order to earn his living. Saramago was educated as technician, and held a number of manual jobs before becoming a journalist, translator, and writer. In 1969 he joined the Communist Party of Portugal, which was outlawed during the military dictatorship, but Saramago also criticized the party. In 1970s Saramago supported himself mostly by translation work, and since 1979 he has devoted himself entirely to writing. Today the author lives in the Canary Islands.

Saramago has published plays, short stories, novels, poems, libretti, diaries, and travelogues. His first novel, MANUEL DE PINTURA E CALIGRAFIA, appeared in 1977. Its basic theme is the genesis of the artist, of a painter as well as a writer. LEVANTADO DO CHÃO (1980) was a three-generation saga of a poor sharecropper family from the post-World War I period up to the 25 April 1974, the date of the Portuguese revolution. The story is presented through a mixture of monologue and dialogue.

"A word lies, with the same word one can speak the truth, we are not what we say, we are true only if others believe us."
(from The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984)

Saramago found International repute in the 1980s with his satirical novel MEMORIAL DO CONVENTO. The novel is set in the first half of the 18th century, and concerns the conflicting reality of visionaries and the authorities of the Church and monarchy. Italian composer Corghi based his opera Blimunda on the novel. O ANO DA MORTE DE RICARDO REIS (1984) takes its subject from the history in the form of a dialogue between the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), and his alternative personality found in the poem collection des de Ricardo Reis (1946). The story is set in the 1930s, the year of the onset of the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar. Symbolic A JAKANDA DE PEDRA (1986) tells the story of Portugal's exclusion from Europe: a series of supernatural events culminates in the severance of the Iberian peninsula so that it starts to float into the Atlantic, initially heading for the Azores.

"In my honest opinion, the reader of a mystery is the only real survivor of the story he is reading, unless it is as the one real survivor that every reader reads every story."
(from The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis)

In 1991 Saramago's most controversial novel, O EVANGELHO SEGUNDO JESUS CHRISTO was published. Sousa Lara, Under-Secretary of State of Portugal, excluded it from the European Union literary contest Ariosto but after an international stir it was returned to the list of candidates. Like Nikos Kazantzákis in his novel The Last Temptations of Christ, or Norman Mailer in The Gospel According to the Son, he interprets the key episodes from the Gospels from an untraditional view. In the novel God and the Devil negotiate about evil and Jesus questions his role and challenges God.

Among his other later novels is All the Names, which deals with a minor official in a population registration office of almost metaphysical dimensions. He becomes obsessed with one of the names and begins to track it down with tragic conclusions. The Tale of the Unknown Island (1999) is a philosophical children's tale about a man who went to the king and asked for a boat.

For further information: Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1993, vol. 4); World Authors 1985-1990, ed. by Vineta Colby (1995); Ebb and Flow: Place As Pretex in the Novels of José Saramago by M.L. Daniel (in Luso-Brazilian Review, Winter 1990)

OS POEMAS POSSÍVEIS, (1966)