A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
|
|||
|
Date
and Place of birth: |
|||
|
Life and Works: Portuguese writer, who has combined is his work myths, history of his own country, and surrealistic imagination. Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998. José Saramago was born in 1922 in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. Not until the age of seven, when he had to present an identification document at primary school, was it realised that his full name was José de Sousa Saramago... He was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class he was writing with no spelling mistakes and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year. Then he was moved up to the grammar school where he stayed two years. For financial reasons he abandoned his high-school studies and trained as a mechanic. After trying different jobs in the civil service, he worked for a publishing company for twelve years and then for newspapers, at one time as assistant editor of Diário de Notícias, a position he was forced to leave after the political events in November 1975. In 1947, the year of the birth of his only child, Violante, he published his first book, a novel that he entitled The Widow, but which for editorial reasons appeared as The Land of Sin. He wrote another novel, The Skylight, still unpublished, and started another one, but did not get past the first few pages: its title was to be Honey and Gall, or maybe Louis, son of Tadeus... The matter was settled when he abandoned the project: it was becoming quite clear to him that he had nothing worthwhile to say. For 19 years, till 1966, when he published Possible Poems, a poetry book that marked his return to literature, he was absent from the Portuguese literary scene. After that, in 1970, another book of poems, Probably Joy and shortly after, in 1971 and 1973 respectively, under the titles From this World and the Other and The Traveller's Baggage (A bagagem do viajante), two collections of newspaper articles which the critics consider essential to the full understanding of his later work. In 1955, to improve the family budget, but also because he enjoyed it, he started to spend part of his free time in translation, an activity that would continue till 1981: Colette, Pär Lagerkvist, Jean Cassou, Maupassant, André Bonnard, Tolstoi, Baudelaire, Étienne Balibar, Nikos Poulantzas, Henri Focillon, Jacques Roumain, Hegel, Raymond Bayer were some of the authors he translated. Between May 1967 and November 1968, he had another parallel occupation as a literary critic. In 1969 he joined the then illegal Communist Party, in which however he has always adopted a critical standpoint. Between 1975 and 1980 Saramago supported himself as a translator but since his literary successes in the 1980s he has devoted himself to his own writing. Saramago has published plays, short stories, novels, poems, libretti, diaries, and travelogues. His first novel, Manual de pintura e caligrafia, appeared in 1977. Its basic theme is the genesis of the artist, of a painter as well as a writer. Levantado do Chao (1980) was a three-generation saga of a poor sharecropper family from the post-World War I period through 25 April 1974, the date of the Portugese revolution. The story is presented through mixed forms of monologue and dialogue. His international breakthrough came in 1982 with the blasphemous and humorous love story Baltasar and Blimunda (Memorial do convento), a novel set in 18th century Portugal. With the exception of another play, entitled The Second Life of Francis of Assisi, published in 1987, the 1980s were entirely dedicated to the Novel: Baltazar and Blimunda, 1982, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984, The Stone Raft, 1986, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, 1989. In 1986, he met the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. They got married in 1988. In consequence of the Portuguese government censorship of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (O evangelho segundo Jesus Christo,1991), vetoing its presentation for the European Literary Prize under the pretext that the book was offensive to Catholics, they transferred their residence to the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries. His awards include Prémio Cidade de Lisboa 1980, Prémio PEN Club Português 1983 and 1984, Prémio da Crítica da Associação Portuguesa 1986, Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela 1991, Prémio Vida Literária 1993, Prémio Camões 1995. O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984) takes its subject from the history in form of a dialogue between the great Portguguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), and his alternative authorial personality from the poem collection Odes de Ricardo Reis (1946). The story is set in the 1930s, the year of the onset of the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar. Symbolic A jangada de pedra (The Stone Raft, 1986) tells a story of Portugal's exclusion from Europe: a series of supernatural events culminates in the severance of the Iberian peninsula so that it starts to float into the Atlantic, initially heading for the Azores. Saramago's tone is ironic - he mixes different views from the Prime Minister and the US president to tourist officers and European Community. A group of people tries to find an explanation for the phenomenon, among them Joaquim Sassa, who threw a stone in the sea. In 1993, he started writing a diary, Cuadernos de Lanzarote (Lanzarote Diaries), with five volumes so far. In 1995, he published the novel Blindness,
in which an epidemic of blindness start to spread in a nameless city. An asylum or a concentration camp, is founded to isolate the blind who see only white
light. A doctor's wife follows her husband to the asylum, and soon around them forms a small group of people who try to maintain some moral values among the
internees, when violence start escalate. "... blindness is the good fortune of the ugly," Saramago writes but actually the blind cannot see the ugliness
of the world. In 1997 he published All the Names, in which he pays a hommage to the bureaucratic labyrinths of Kafka. It depicts a minor official, Senhor José, in a dismal registry, who becomes obsessed with one of the names, an unknown woman, and begins to track it down. But in stead of order, he finds chaos.. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature In 2001 he published La caverna and in 2002, El hombre duplicado. Selected works:
Bibliography about José Saramago:
|
80 million books from around the corner and around the world are at your fingertips, online @ abebooks.com |
||
|
|||
Descargue aquí nuestros buscadores de libros