The Brilliance of Jose Saramago

When the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, it capped off a long and mostly non-illustrious career.  Saramago left school at age 12 when his parents could no longer afford the fees, entering vocational school shortly after.  His first job was as a car mechanic. 

Saramago didn’t begin writing until his twenties, and even then, only published one novel, in 1947.  He then turned to journalism and poetry.  The world beyond Portugal didn’t discover his work until the international publication of Baltasar and Blimunda in 1982.  Saramago was 60 years old. 

Saramago’s most well-known work is Blindness (1997) although he certainly achieved infamy with his 1993 book, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.  His country’s government censored Saramago’s controversial retelling of biblical stories, which caused him to live in self-imposed exile in the Canary Islands for the rest of his life. 

In retrospect, Saramago winning the Nobel doesn’t surprise us.  Yet at the time, Saramago’s unique literary style—sentences that run for pages, separated only by occasional periods and commas—took time for readers to wrap their heads around. 

Upon finding his voice Saramago never wavered.  After publishing a few poetry books in the seventies, he turned to novel writing for the rest of his life, refusing to be silenced—or to appeal to market forces to find his voice. 

Finding His Voice

In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, Saramago reveals the importance of the characters in his novels to his personal life. 

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.

Saramago’s vast imagination comes through in his politically-driven and emotionally-startling works.  The themes spring forward from a creative mind, yet he still pulled you, the reader, into his world regardless of where you reside.

Among the innovative themes in his books:

• Blindness:  A mass epidemic of blindness results in social breakdown; a small group unites behind one woman who has somehow escaped the mass pandemic. 
• Death With Interruptions:  Everyone in an unnamed and landlocked country wakes up to discover no one will die any longer, a phenomenon that threatens religious authority.
• Seeing:  In this follow-up to Blindness, 83% of the population casts blank ballots during a parliamentary election, sending the government into disarray. 
• The Stone Raft:  The landmass shared by Portugal and Spain, the Iberian peninsula, breaks off from the rest of Europe and floats into the Atlantic Ocean, forcing these two countries to come to terms with their new fate. 

Jose Saramago died from leukemia in 2010 at the age of 87.  He remains an example of the importance of finding your own voice, regardless of trends or demands to meet market forces. He remained committed to developing his own unique style of writing, and the world is better off for it.