Carlos - A biography

José Saramago

José de Souza Saramago, or just José Saramago, was born in a small Portuguese village called Azinhaga, on the province of Ribatejo on November 16th, 1922, and died on June 18th, 2010. His landless peasant family moved to Lisbon, where his father started to work as a policeman when he was just two years and there he lived much of his life. “Saramago”, a plant known as wild radish in English, was incorporated by accident to his name; that was the nickname of his fathers' family.

Although Saramago was a good student, his family couldn't send him to a college, and he graduated in a technical school as a mechanic. Nevertheless, he maintained contact with the books on his night visits to the Municipal Library. Later, he worked as translator and journalist. He married Ilda Reis in 1944. In 1947, at the age of 25, he wrote his first novel, Terra do Pecado (Land of Sin, in a free translation), in the same year his only child, Violante, was born. He had a second wife, the journalist Pilar del Rio, who lived with Saramago from 1988 until his death. But only in 1975, at the age of 53, after the publication of some chronicles and poetry books (and also after some controversies on the period that he worked as assistant editor), he finally started his successful carrier as a novelist.

The first acclaimed book of Saramago was Baltasar and Blimunda (Memorial do Convento, in the original), released on 1982, about a love story that takes place in the Convent of Mafra at the 18th century, using real and fictitious characters. Among the most important books he wrote, besides the above mentioned, there are The year of the death of Ricardo Reis, about one of the many heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, and the most controversial one, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, in which he reinterprets the New Testament using an human Jesus against an ambitious God.

Saramago was not only a brilliant novelist – he won the Camões Prize in 1995 and the Nobel Prize in 1998, but he was also a very polemic character. He, as an assumed atheist, had public discussions with the Catholic Church, and was censored in his own country – one of the reasons for his moving to Spain. He also militated in the Communist Party for decades, and was accused of Anti-Semitism because of the interpretations of his comments about the Jews in an interview for a Brazilian magazine. But, in the end, he will be mainly remembered, at least for the book lovers, for his major contribuition to the Portuguese Literature, his unique style and his insightful narratives. In the last post of his blog, Saramago gives us a message for reflection:

"I think in today's society we need philosophy.
Philosophy as space, place, method of reflection,
that may not have a goal,
as science, which advances to meet objectives.
We lack reflection, thinking, and it seems to me that, without ideas,
we're going nowhere. "