"With no help or guidance except curiosity and the will to learn, my taste for reading developed and was refined."
Remembering Portuguese novelist and journalist José Saramago.
Despite his poor background, Saramago learned to read and write at an early age. He was a lifelong learner who was everything from a mechanic at a car repair shop to a journalist at different points in his life.
His writings are known for their blend of imagination, compassion and irony. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.
Learn more about him: https://bit.ly/3fObszP
José Saramago, Nobel Prize-Winning Writer, Dies
By FERNANDA EBERSTADT
Published: June 18, 2010
José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, died on Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87.
Joao Cortesao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
José Saramago arriving for the opening of an exhibition dedicated to his work at Ajuda Palace in Lisbon in April 2008.
Related
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José Saramago, the Unexpected Fantasist (August 26, 2007)
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Paper Cuts Blog: José Saramago, R.I.P. (June 18, 2010)
Times Topic: Jose Saramago
A tall, commandingly austere man with a dry, schoolmasterly manner, Mr. Saramago gained international acclaim for novels like “Baltasar and Blimunda” and “Blindness.” (A film adaptation of “Blindness” by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles was released in 2008.)
He was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, and more than two million copies of his books have been sold, his longtime friend and editor, Zeferino Coelho, said.
A novel by Mr. Saramago, “The Elephant’s Journey,” is to be published posthumously in English on Sept. 8 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. In later years he used his stature as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.
To many Americans, Mr. Saramago’s name is associated with a statement he made while touring the West Bank in 2002, when he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.
As a professional novelist, Mr. Saramago was a late bloomer. A first novel, published when he was 23, was followed by 30 years of silence. He became a full-time writer only in his late 50s, after working variously as a garage mechanic, a welfare agency bureaucrat, a printing production manager, a proofreader, a translator and a newspaper columnist.
In 1975, a countercoup overthrew Portugal’s Communist-led revolution of the previous year, and Mr. Saramago was fired as deputy editor of the Lisbon newspaper Diário de Noticias. Overnight, along with other prominent leftists, he became virtually unemployable.
“Being fired was the best luck of my life,” he said in an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 2007. “It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.”
His first major success was the rollicking love story “Baltasar and Blimunda.” Set in 18th-century Portugal, it portrays the misadventures of three eccentrics threatened by the Inquisition: a heretic priest who constructs a flying machine and the two lovers who help him — Baltasar, a one-handed ex-soldier, and Blimunda, a sorceress’s daughter who has X-ray vision.
At one point the couple decides to take refuge for the night in a hayloft. “There is no more satisfying smell than that of turned hay,” Mr. Saramago writes, “of bodies under a blanket, of oxen feeding at the trough, the scent of cold air filtering through the chinks in the hayloft, and perhaps the scent of the moon, for everyone knows that the night assumes a different smell when there is moonlight, and even a blind man, who is incapable of distinguishing night from day, will say, The moon is shining, St. Lucy is believed to have worked this miracle, so it is really only a question of inhaling, Yes, my friends, what a splendid moon this evening.”
The novel, published in an English translation in 1987, won Mr. Saramago a passionate international following. The critic Irving Howe, praising its union of “harsh realism” and “lyric fantasy,” described Mr. Saramago as “a voice of European skepticism, a connoisseur of ironies.”
“I think I hear in his prose echoes of Enlightenment sensibility, caustic and shrewd,” Mr. Howe wrote.
Asked by The New York Times in 2008 to assess Mr. Saramago’s achievement, the critic James Wood wrote: “José Saramago was both an avant-gardist and a traditionalist. His long blocks of unbroken prose, lacking conventional markers like paragraph breaks and quotation marks, could look forbidding and modernist; but his frequent habit of handing over the narration in his novels to a kind of ‘village chorus’ and what seem like peasant simplicities allowed Saramago great flexibility.”
On the one hand, Mr. Wood wrote, it allowed the writer to “revel in sheer storytelling,” and on the other to “undermine, ironically, the very ‘truths’ and simplicities his apparently unsophisticated narrators traded in.”
Paradox was Mr. Saramago’s stock in trade. A militant atheist who maintained that human history would have been a lot more peaceful if it weren’t for religion, his novels are still preoccupied with the question of God.
His novel “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” in which Jesus on the cross apologizes to mankind for God’s sins, was deemed blasphemous by some believers and deeply religious by others. When the Portuguese government, under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church, blocked its entry for a European Literary Prize in 1992, Mr. Saramago chose to go into exile in the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession.
Mr. Saramago’s hardscrabble origins did not seem to predestine him for a life of letters. Born in 1922 in the village of Azinhaga, 60 miles northeast of Lisbon, he was largely raised by his maternal grandparents while his parents sought work in the big city.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, Mr. Saramago spoke admiringly of these grandparents, illiterate peasants who, in the winter, slept in the same bed as their piglets yet who imparted to him a taste for fantasy and folklore as well as a respect for nature.
One of Mr. Saramago’s last books, and one of his most touching, was a childhood memoir titled “Small Memories.” In it, he recounts the trauma of being transplanted from his grandparents’ rural shack to Lisbon, where his father had joined the police force. Several months later, Francisco, his older brother and only sibling, died of pneumonia.
Mr. Saramago loved to tell a story of how he came by his surname. His real family name was de Sousa. But when, as a 7-year-old boy, he showed up for his first day of school and presented his birth certificate, it was discovered that the clerk in his home village had registered him as José Saramago. “Saramago,” which means “wild radish,” a green that country people were obliged to eat in hard times, was the insulting nickname by which the novelist’s father was known.
“My father wasn’t very happy, but if that was his son’s official name, well, then he too had to take it,” he recounted in the 2007 interview. The family remained so poor, Mr. Saramago recalled in his memoir, that every spring his mother pawned their blankets, hoping that she might be able to redeem them by the following winter.
Though he was a good student, his family’s financial straits compelled Mr. Saramago to drop out of grammar school at 12 and switch to a vocational school, where he was trained as a car mechanic.
The most oppressive influence on him, however, was one he rarely wrote about: the fascist regime that ruled Portugal from 1926 to 1974. “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,” regarded as his masterpiece, is his only novel to deal directly with the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar.
Set in 1936 in a Europe darkened by the ascendancy of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar, the book tells the story of the title character, a doctor and poet living in Brazil who returns to fascist Lisbon when he hears of the death of his friend Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s great modernist poet.
What gives the book its dreamlike blend of historical reality and illusion is the fact that Ricardo Reis was actually one of the aliases Fernando Pessoa used to publish much of his verse. The novel, consisting of increasingly macabre encounters between the ghost of Pessoa and his fictional alter ego is a delicate meditation on identity and nothingness, poetry and power.
In his later years, Mr. Saramago’s fiction became more starkly allegorical. In novels like “Blindness,” in which an entire city is struck by a plague of sightlessness that reduces most of its citizens to barbarism, readers have found a powerful parable about the fragility of human civilization.
Mr. Saramago’s first marriage, to Ilda Reis, whom he wed in 1944, ended in divorce in 1970. Besides his wife, Ms. del Río, whom he married in 1988, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Violante Saramago Matos; and two grandchildren.
“Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world,” the critic Harold Bloom said in an interview for this obituary in 2008. “He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile — he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.”
2012-07-22 00:56
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【張鐵志】
這不僅是個謊言的年代，還是個失去抵抗的想像力的年代，但薩拉馬戈鼓舞人們不要氣餒，要透過行動讓這個世界變成一個更好的地方。這本用隱喻與寓言來探索世界的諾貝爾文學獎得主的筆記《謊言的年代》，透過最直接的批判，讓人們張開眼睛去洞察世界，不再盲目。
若你看得到，就仔細看
若你能仔細看，就好好觀察
這是薩拉馬戈在其小說《盲目》上的一段話。某日當他在改版上市的《切．格瓦拉：革命前的摩托車日記》的封套上發現他的這段話被引用時，他 說，「突然之間，對於迫切恢復視力，對抗盲目，我有了深刻的理解和洞穿的眼力。我之所以能如此，是不是因為我已經看見了那些書中未被實際寫下的字句？或 者，是否因為今天的世界變得更加需要對抗陰暗？我不清楚。但是，若你能看得到，那就好好觀察吧。」
是的，今天的世界更加需要對抗陰暗，因為，這是一個「謊言的年代」。這本書，一個擅長用隱喻與寓言來探索世界的諾貝爾文學獎得主的筆記，是要透過最直接的批判，讓人們張開眼睛去洞察世界，不再盲目。
人道主義核心關懷
薩拉馬戈的人生其實就是伴隨著葡萄牙顛簸的政治史，而且文學之外，他也始終以不同方式介入政治。
1926年，薩拉馬戈四歲時，葡萄牙出現軍事政變，而後轉變為一個法西斯政權。1969年，充滿政治熱情的薩拉馬戈加入共產黨；五年後， 「康乃馨革命」爆發，左翼政權上台，葡萄牙開始走向民主化，薩拉馬戈也被任命為國有報紙的主管。但75年11月，在一次不成功的政變後，葡萄牙出現一個採 取社會民主路線的新政府。作為共產黨員的薩拉馬戈因此被報社開除。
此時五十多歲的薩拉馬戈決定開始做為專業作家。而他上次出版小說，也是他第一次出版，是23歲。他說，「被開除是我生命中最幸運的事情。這個事件讓我停下來思考，開啟了我作為一個作家的新生命。」
然後是一本接一本小說，並且獲得了諾貝爾文學獎。
2008年9月開始到2009年8月期間，他開始寫部落格，然後集結成為這本英文書名叫做「筆記」的書。在這一篇篇短小而犀利的篇幅中， 我們看到一個強烈人道主義的左翼知識份子，如何嚴厲地批評小布希和義大利總理、批評以色列政府；他也寫他在墨西哥聽馬科斯演講的激動，寫轉型正義、關達那 摩監獄、這個世界對女人的壓迫。
薩拉馬戈的核心關懷是這個世界被「組織性的謊言」編織而成的網所覆蓋。他們說我們作為選民是國家的主人，他們說我們做為消費者是市場的主人，但其實我們是被政客和企業所矇騙、操弄、支配。當然做為一個馬克思主義者，薩拉馬戈更激烈批評了宗教的謊言。
批判民主偽善面目
薩拉馬戈對當代民主的實踐也是充滿了懷疑：
「我們錯誤地認知民主便只限定在所謂政黨、國會和政府這些計量的數字與機制的運作，絲毫不去注意它們的實質內涵，並且放任它們扭曲、濫用 選票所賦予它們的位置以及責任……我拒絕接受，現行的民主模式，會是統治與被統治的關係裡，唯一一種可行的道路……我們明明就在餵養著這些禍害，卻表現得 像是發明了一種萬物通用的萬靈藥方，能夠治癒在這星球上六十億居民的身體與靈魂：服用我們這款民主靈藥，一次十滴，一天三次，你就能永遠歡樂下去。而真相 是，真正而且唯一致命的罪孽，就是偽善。」
這個對民主的偽善與謊言的批判是左翼思想的根本傳統。薩拉馬戈說的對，政治民主不可能脫離經濟與文化的民主而存在，現行的民主也不是這個 世界唯一的可能。然而，我們也不能否定「資產階級民主」而淪為左翼威權統治的辯護者（當前最明顯的就是中國的新左派學者，以批評西方民主來將現行中國的政 治模式合理化）。關鍵不是要揚棄現在的自由主義民主（對個人權利的保障、對政治權力的制衡等），而是要不斷深化，讓公民能更積極地參與公共事務，更好地控 制掌權者。
當然，資本主義體制中民主面臨的最大問題，是真正影響公共事務的不是人們選出的政府，而是沒有人民賦與正當性的市場：
「人民並未選擇能管控市場機制的政府，相反的，是市場在各個層面上，透過政府，把人民交到市場機制的操弄之下。而我如此的談論市場機制， 唯一的理由就是在今日，它是特出、統合而唯一的權力，是全球經濟和金融的強權，這種強權並非民主，因為它從未經由人民選舉；這種強權不是民主，因為它從未 交由人民統治；而最後，這種強權不屬民主，因為它並未以人民福祉為其目標。」
但即使他從左翼的觀點嚴厲批評了資本主義與現行的民主，他對當代的左派評價也很低：「左派對於他們所居住的這個世界，一點操他媽的理念想法都沒有。」「左派還是繼續他們那懦夫般的態度，不思考，不行動，不冒風險往前踏出步伐。」
拒絕盲目鼓舞思考
因而，這不僅是個謊言的年代，還是個失去抵抗的想像力的年代，是我們自己從戰場上撤退了：「我們已經喪失了分析這個世界上正發生事情的批 判能力。我們看來是被鎖藏在柏拉圖的洞穴裡，業已拋棄我們思考和行動的責任。我們已經讓自己成了無法憤怒的呆惰生物，無法拒絕隨波逐流，失去了向我們最近 的過去，那些崢嶸的人與事，發出異議的能力。我們已經來到了文明的終點，而我並不歡迎那象徵終結的最後號角聲。」
但薩拉馬戈鼓舞人們不要氣餒，要透過行動讓這個世界變成一個更好的地方。尤其，
「如果一個作家屬於他所身處的那個時代，倘若他沒有受到過 去的鎖鏈綑綁，他就必須知道他生而為人的這個時代當中所發生的各種問題……最要緊的是，當世界需要批判觀點的時候，文學就不應該遺世而孤立。」
所以，請走出暗黑的洞穴，張開你的眼睛，拒絕盲目。（本文摘刊自時報出報新書《謊言的年代：薩拉馬戈雜文集》的導讀）
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