(1922-2010) Portuguese writer who published as a very young man an unmemorable first novel, Terra do Pecado ["Land of Sin"] (1947), and some plays and essays over the next decades, but only became well-known with his third novel, Memorial do convento (1982; trans Giovanni Pontiero as Baltasar and Blimunda 1987 US), a lyrical FABULATION set in an eighteenth-century world where sf elements – a nun with x-RAY vision; a priest's INVENTION of a flying machine that transports its passengers into space, where Heaven is located – are luminously commingled (> EQUIPOISE) with a SATIRICAL portrait of Portugal. Several of his later novels intensify narrative strategies which seem at times hallucinated but never fail to embody understandings of the world both coherent and unmistakably transgressive within the disturbed intellectual environment of modern Portugal. In A jangada de pedra (1986; trans Giovanni Pontiero as The Stone Raft 1994 US), Portugal and Spain are mysteriously broken off from the main of Europe, becoming an ISLAND, adrift and isolated from the passage of true history elsewhere; in Historia do cerco de Lisboa (1989; trans Giovanni Pontiero as The History of the Siege of Lisbon 1997 US), a proofing error in a history of Portugal transforms the Myth of Origin (> The ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASY) of that country. Saramago has often been compared to Jose Luis BORGES and Franz KAFKA; he has been called a Magic Realist, not convincingly, though his stories share some of the fixated energy characteristic of Gabriel García Márquez (1927- ) (> The ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASY); contemporary writers who share his mythopoeic focus on the nature and fate of their native land include Milorad PAVIĆ and (arguably) Umberto ECO.
Later works tend even more intensely to employ central conceits that transform superficially simple narratives into unmistakable multivalent allegories whose essential drift – Saramago was, in his words, a "libertarian Communist" – remained consistently and continually offensive to the world's officers (the Roman Catholic Church's official newspaper, l'Osservatore Romano, editorialized negatively on him after his death). In Ensaio sobrea a cegueira (1995; trans Giovanni Pontiero and Margaret Jull Costa as Blindness 1997 UK), everyone in a CITY, which may be coterminous with the world, goes suddenly blind except for one woman, who is overwhelmed by terror at the nescience of the world now exposed; in a thematic sequel, Ensaio sobre a Lucidez (2004; trans Margaret Jull Costa as Seeing 2006 US), all the inhabitants of the same unnamed CITY are blessed with truth-exposing vision, and no one votes for anyone in the election being held. The government falls.
Saramago received the NOBEL PRIZE for Literature in 1998. His funeral in Lisbon was attended by 20,000 mourners. [JC]
born Azinhaga, Satarém, Portugal: 16 November 1922
died Tias, Lanzarote, Canary Islands: 18 June 2010