José Saramago

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**José de Sousa Saramago** <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Image:Josesaramago.jpg
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Born:	November 16 1922 (age 87) Azinhaga, Ribatejo, Portugal
Occupation(s):	Playwright, Novelist <tr><th style="text-align: right;">Nationality:</th><td>Portuguese</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align: right;">Writing period:</th><td>1947-present</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align: right;">Debut work(s):</th><td>Terra do Pecado</td></tr>

José de Sousa Saramago, GCSE (pron. IPA [ʒu'zɛ sɐɾɐ'magu]) (born November 16, 1922) is a Portuguese writer, playwright, and journalist. He usually presents subversive perspectives of historical events in his works, trying to underline the human factor behind historical events, instead of presenting the official historical narratives. Some works of his can also be seen as allegories in several contexts.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He currently lives on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain. He was in his mid-fifties before he won the acclaim of an international audience. It was the publication in 1988 of his Baltasar and Blimunda that first brought him to the attention of an English-speaking readership. This novel won the Portuguese PEN Club Award. Saramago has been a member of the Portuguese Communist Party since 1969, as well as an atheist and self-described pessimist - his positions have aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. José Saramago’s novels often deal with fantastic scenarios and situations such as the one in his 1986 novel, The Stone Raft, where the Iberian Peninsula breaks from the rest of Europe and begins sailing around the Atlantic. In his 1995 novel, Blindness, an entire unnamed country is stricken with a mysterious plague, or “white blindess”. In Saramago's 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 survives for a year after the poet himself dies. With these highly imaginative themes, Saramago succinctly deals with the most serious of subject matter with boundless wit and keen insight. He sprinkles many quirky segues and asides into his sparsely punctuated, but richly decorated narrative thread. His greatest asset as an author is his empathy for the human condition and the isolative nature of contemporary urban life. His characters struggle with their need to connect with one another, form relationships, bond as a community, and their need for individuality, to find meaning and dignity outside of political/economic structures. Harold Bloom has stated that he considers José Saramago the "most gifted novelist alive in the world today".

In 2002 Saramago stated "What is happening in Palestine is a crime which we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz."

1 Biography
- 1.1 Family history
2 Style
3 Bibliography
4 Additional information

[edit] Biography

[edit] Family history

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 language as wild radish, was his father's family's nickname, which got 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 attending a grammar school, moving him to a technical school at age 12; after finishing school, he worked as a car mechanic for two years. Later he worked as a translator, then as a journalist, and finally as a writer. Saramago married Ilda Reis in 1944. Their only child, Violante, was born in 1947. Saramago is currently married to Pilar del Río, from a very powerful Barcelona family of editors who actively promote his books around the world, and they live on the Spanish island of Lanzarote.

[edit] Style

Saramago tends to write long sentences, often 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 some authors' chapters. He uses no quotation marks to delimit dialog; when the speaker changes Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's clause. Surprisingly, this style is neither taxing nor inordinately disorienting. In his novels Blindness and The Cave, Saramago sometimes abandons the use of proper nouns; indeed, the difficulty of naming is a recurring theme in his work.

[edit] Bibliography

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
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	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	2002	ISBN 0151004145
O Homem Duplicado	2003	The Double	2004	ISBN 0151010404)
Ensaio sobre a Lucidez	2004	Seeing	2006	ISBN 0151012385
Don Giovanni ou o Dissoluto Absolvido	2005
As Intermitências da Morte	2005
As Pequenas Memórias	2006

[edit] Additional information

José Saramago

Terra do Pecado • Os Poemas Possíveis • Provavelmente Alegria • Deste Mundo e do Outro • A Bagagem do Viajante • As Opiniões que o DL teve • O Ano de 1993 • Os Apontamentos • Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia • Objecto Quase • Viagem a Portugal • Baltasar and Blimunda • The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis • The Stone Raft • The History of the Siege of Lisbon • The Gospel According to Jesus Christ • Ensaio sobre a Cegueira • All the Names • The Tale of the Unknown Island • The Cave • O Homem Duplicado • Ensaio sobre a Lucidez • Don Giovanni ou o Dissoluto Absolvido • As Intermitências da Morte •As Pequenas Memórias

Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1976-2000)