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Jose Saramago's BLINDNESS
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Biography of Saramago, Jose (1922-) Biography José de Sousa Saramago is a Portuguese writer, journalist and playwright. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He currently lives in the Canary islands. José Saramago was born in Azinhaga, a small village north-east of Lisbon in 1922. In 1924, José's family moved to Lisbon, where, although he was a good student, José had to leave school for financial reasons. Eventually he began working as a translator and a journalist for the paper Diário de Noticias. He eventually married Ilda Reis, with whom he had a daughter in 1947. In 1988, José Saramago remarried to Pilar del Rio, a journalist who is also the official translator of his books into Spanish. Saramago didn't achieve literary acclaim until his mid-fifties with the publication of the novel Baltasar and Blimunda. Saramago has been a source of controversy since he joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969–he is also openly an atheist. His stances on the state of Israel and his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ have angered both the Jewish and Catholic community respectively. Saramago's novels are stylistically unique in a few ways. The premises of his novels are often fantastic: In The Stone Raft, the iberian peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe; In the The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, poet Fernando Pessoa's pseudonym outlives him by a year; in Blindness, a nameless city is stricken by a plague of blindness. Saramago also tends to write extremely long sentences without embedded dialogue. He also resists the use of proper nouns, meaning that the majority of his characters do not have names.
Terra do Pecado, 1947 Os Poemas Possíveis, 1966 Provavelmente Alegria, 1970 Deste Mundo e do Outro, 1971 A Bagagem do Viajante, 1973 As Opiniões que o DL teve, 1974 O Ano de 1993, 1975
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