“Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.”
Gifted with words, José de Sousa Saramago wandered about, trying out a host of other social roles – mechanic, civil servant, production manager at a publishing company, editor, literary critic – before puncturing a three-decade balloon (by getting fired!) and releasing his fiction out into the world. He had grown up in poverty – every spring, his mother would reportedly pawn out their blankets, in the hopes of redeeming them before the next winter – and came to be known for his stances against globalization and the oppressive nature of governments.
The Portuguese is the UPOU Book Club’s Featured Author this week, as we all watch September and its historical footnotes flicker quietly across our social media universe.
Saramago, who died at age 87, has been described in many ways: a “militant atheist”, an “unfaltering Communist”, someone “both an avant-gardist and a traditionalist”, a “radical”, the “son of landless peasants”, a “connoisseur of ironies”, and a “voice of European skepticism”. But among the many identifiers and accolades, there is one (coming from his translator) that any writer would dream of – he has been called a “complete original”.
When he won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, he recalled his grandparents:
“In winter when the cold of the night grew to the point of freezing the water in the pots inside the house, they went to the sty and fetched the weaklings among the piglets, taking them to their bed. Under the coarse blankets, the warmth from the humans saved the little animals from freezing and rescued them from certain death. Although the two were kindly people, it was not a compassionate soul that prompted them to act in that way: what concerned them, without sentimentalism or rhetoric, was to protect their daily bread, as is natural for people who, to maintain their life, have not learnt to think more than is needful.”
This “sardonic peasant pragmatism” has been Saramago’s ticket to literary immortality. His works are peppered with the tensions between what is real and what is not real, and to taste them in works like Baltasar and Blimunda, The Stone Raft, Seeing and Blindness is to be reminded that, yes, not all things have been written about.
Saramago also plays with religious themes, and does so in a way that is utterly captivating, if not shaking, as one can find in The Gospel According to Christ or Cain. He recreates scenes in a manner that makes a reader thankful there are writers – with eyes utterly their own – drifting from and through the world.
The next time you pass by any of his books in a store or a shelf, crack it open to the first page and peek for a quick read. Oh, commas have never looked more beautiful.
The UPOU Book Club 