José Saramago

José Saramago , 1922-, Portuguese novelist and short-story writer. He has been a member of the Communist since 1969 and is a staunch atheist. Although Saramago's first novel (never translated into English) was published in 1947, he was essentially a journalist until a year after the 1974 revolution. His second novel (also as yet untranslated) was not published until 1976 and during the following decades was followed by numerous other works of fiction. Often employing paradox and irony, mingling humor with melancholy, mixing skepticism with fantasy, and blending historical events with elements of myth, allegory, and folktale, much of his fiction provides a Portuguese view of Iberian history. Saramago's stories are characteristically told by an unidentified narrator whose voice and attitude are distinctively sly, jocular, and pessimistic, and his protagonists are often portrayed resisting some kind of stifling and dehumanizing social institution.

Saramago's novels include Levantado do chão [raised from the floor] (1980); Memorial do convento (1982; tr. Baltasar and Blimunda, 1987), a picaresque love story set in the Portuguese Inquisition and the work that first brought him international acclaim; O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (1984; tr. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1990); A jangada de pedra (1986; tr. The Stone Raft, 1995); the controversial O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (1991; tr. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, 1994); Ensaio sobre a cegueira (1995; tr. Blindness, 1998), a political parable in which a city lapses into barbarism following a plague of blindness, perhaps his finest work, and its sequel, Ensaio sobre a lucidez (2004; tr. Seeing, 2006); Todos os nomes (1997; tr. All the Names, 1999); A Caverna (2000; tr. The Cave, 2002); and Homem duplicado (2002; tr. The Double, 2004). He has also written poetry, essays, plays, journals, and a memoir. After the Portuguese government blocked the nomination of his 1991 novel about Jesus for a literary prize, he moved (1992) to the Canary Islands in an act of symbolic self-exile. Critics have noted that the novels written after the move are more austere, stylized, allegorical, and universal than his previous Portugal-themed works. Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.

Bibliography: See study by H. Bloom, ed. (2005).