intellectual properties

RIP Jose Saramago

my eyes teared when i read this obituary this morning: Nobel Prize-Winning Writer Saramago Dead at 87.

From the 1980s Saramago was one of Portugal’s best-selling contemporary writers and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages.

But he never courted the kind of fame offered by literary prizes and his bluntness could sometimes offend.

”I am skeptical, reserved, I don’t gush, I don’t go around smiling, hugging people and trying to make friends,” he once said.

His outspokenness set off a storm of protest in 2002 when during a visit he compared Ramallah, a Palestinian city blockaded at the time by the Israeli army, to the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Holocaust survivors and intellectuals, including left-wing doves who were highly critical of the Israeli government’s policy toward the Palestinians, condemned Saramago’s statement as false and anti-Semitic.

In 1998 he said his book ”Blindness” was about ”a blindness of rationality.” In that book, which was made into a 2008 movie starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, the population of an unnamed city is struck by a mysterious blindness which is never explained. Society’s fragilities come to the fore as a general breakdown of infrastructures ensues.

”We’re rational beings but we don’t behave rationally. If we did, there’d be no starvation in the world,” he said.

Such compassion and anxiety about the skewing of priorities in modern society is evident in all his works and also gives a clue to his enduring sympathy toward the Communist Party.

He was frequently compared with Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his writing is often described as realism tinged with Latin-American mysticism, particularly for his technique of confronting historical personages with fictional characters.

Portuguese critic Torcato Sepulveda said Saramago successfully ”sought to reconcile the rationalism of his materialistic world view with the richness of his baroque style.”

Others disagreed, saying Saramago was too intellectual and that his storytelling pace often slowed to a dreary plod, or that his sparing use of punctuation and speech marks confused the reader.

Saramago had a remedy: ”I tell them to read my books out loud and then they’ll pick up the rhythm, because this is ‘written orality.’ It is the written version of the way people tell stories to each other,” he said.

i cannot recommend this man’s works enough. “Blindness” is still one of the most compelling novels i’ve ever read, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” is absolutely sublime and a must-read for anyone intrigued by those Biblically undocumented years of Jesus’ life and what they might have contained, “Death with Interruptions” is the darkest of dark comedies, and as I mentioned I just started reading “Seeing” just this week, about what happens to politics in an election in which 87% of the ballots cast are blank. I didn’t enjoy “The Double” as much as the others, but it is still worth reading. His style and vision are unparalleled, and his poetic and unbelievably creative investigations of religion, politics and culture are some of the most daring i’ve ever read.

RIP to my favorite author, and thank you for all that you gave to the world. he was a prime example of the provocative thinker and reason for art: if what you are doing causes no one to question, then why do it?

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