Jose Saramago
Born: November 16, 1922 Died: June 18, 2010
Jose Saramago from Portugal was one of those literary giants who make what is being written today seem small and insignificant. I suppose that it is not a good argument for reading Saramago that he spoils modern fiction for you, but read him anyhow. He is one of three Portuguese literary virtuosos – Jose Maria de Eca de Queirós of the late nineteenth century, Fernando Pessoa of the early twentieth century, and Jose Saramago of the late twentieth century – all of whom wrote incredible fictions that are still powerful today. Portugal can consider itself fortunate to have had three such impressive writers.
Jose Saramago wrote convincing allegories that reflect upon the human condition. It was Saramago’s practice as a fiction writer to set whimsical parables against realistic historical backgrounds in order to comment ironically on the human situation. This gives his work a depth that few writers attain.
Perhaps his most famous work is ‘Blindness’. In ‘Blindness’ an epidemic of white blindness strikes the city, and the story becomes a parable for the loss and disorientation and struggle for survival which beset the world in the twentieth century. Saramago as a writer never shied away from the big themes and ideas.
“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
“I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
“The difficult thing isn’t living with other people, it’s understanding them.”
But I’ve been reading Saramago a long time, and there are other novels that I’ve read that absolutely demand to be mentioned. ‘The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis’ is Saramago’s fictional homage to that maverick Portuguese genius Fernando Pessoa who also wrote poetry as well as fiction. Saramago also wrote ‘The Gospel of Jesus Christ’ which got him into big trouble with the Catholic Church. I will list other Saramago novels that I have read, but the fact that I’m only listing them represents no drop-off in quality : ‘Baltazar and Blimunda’, ‘The Stone Raft’, ‘The History of the Siege of Lisbon’, ‘Cain’.
Saramago was prolific having written at least twenty-five novels, so I still have a lot of his work left to read. Reading each of his novels, even the short ones, is an exhilarating, exhausting, and transforming experience, so I wait a long time between novels.
The above may have wrongly convinced you that Saramago is a difficult writer, but that is not the case. He did his best to make his books readable. Here is one of his thoughts on writing.
“Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.”
I really think you all have got to read this exciting and mind-altering writer, Jose Saramago.
Tony's Book World 
Posted by Lisa Hill on September 9, 2018 at 4:03 AM
Amen to that. I discovered Saramago a little while ago and I have never been disappointed in his novels. What I didn’t know is that he wrote 25 of them, so I have quite a few more to hunt out!
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Posted by Anokatony on September 9, 2018 at 7:10 AM
Hi Lisa,
Yes he wrote quite a few before he was discovered in about 1982, and he remained prolific in his old age, completing seven novels in the 2000s. I have only read one of these seven late novels, ‘Cain’, so I have a lot more to read also.
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Posted by Lisa Hill on September 9, 2018 at 1:23 PM
I’ve reviewed these four: https://anzlitlovers.com/category/writers-aust-nz-in-capitals/saramago-jose/ and three on the TBR (including Cain) but I haven’t got The History of the Siege of Lisbon yet, and that’s one I really want to read.
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Posted by Anokatony on September 9, 2018 at 9:24 PM
Of those I have only read ‘Cain’ which I thought was excellent. I have read ‘The History of the Siege of Lisbon’ which is even better than ‘Cain’.
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Posted by Lisa Hill on September 10, 2018 at 1:37 AM
So I believe. I think it’s listed in 1001 Books. But I am not going to buy it till I’ve read the ones I’ve got (not to mention a few others on the S shelf…)
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Posted by kaggsysbookishramblings on September 9, 2018 at 6:10 PM
I’ve only read the one so far, but I absolutely loved it. I want to read “Ricardo Reis” but I want to read Pessoa first! So many books, so little time…
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Posted by Anokatony on September 9, 2018 at 9:22 PM
Hi kaggsy,
‘The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis’ is the novel that brought me to Fernando Pessoa. Then I read a few of Pessoa’s poems which were outstanding, and then I read Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’ which may be the novel of the century. So maybe it is a good idea to ease into Pessoa with ‘The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis’ first.
I will soon be reading the selected poems of Fernando Pessoa which was published by NYBR.
Here is something I wrote about Pessoa eight years ago:
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Posted by kaggsysbookishramblings on September 9, 2018 at 11:42 PM
Thanks Tony! 😁
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Posted by Cathy746books on September 10, 2018 at 12:07 AM
I’ve had Blindness waiting to be read for years now! These all sound great though.
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Posted by Anokatony on September 10, 2018 at 12:13 AM
I remember when ‘Blindness’ was very popular with all of us literary internet crowd. It was one of the first novels that seemed to sweep over everybody. It was soon after Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Posted by themisanthropologist on September 10, 2018 at 10:12 AM
I didn’t used to like Jose Saramago, but I’ve lately changed my mind. One of my favorites is his short autobiography, Small Memories and Death, with Interruptions.
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Posted by Anokatony on September 10, 2018 at 8:40 PM
Hi The Misanthropologist,
‘Death, with Interruptions’ could very well be my next.
The first George Eliot I read was Silas Marner, and I thought it was sappy. However a few years later I came back to George Eliot and she became one of my favorite authors especially after reading Middlemarch.
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