Jose Saramago is a Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He has come again to the world's attention with the release, this week, of the movie version of his classic tale Blindness. Saramago, now 86-years old, lives in the Canary Islands with his Spanish wife, Pilar del Rio. He says, "I was born 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". Even his actual date of birth and his surname is a source of confusion. His father's surname was de Souza, but a sly clerk recorded Jose as Saramago, or "wild radish", his father's derogatory nickname.
His father, who became a traffic policeman in Lisbon, could not afford to send his son to grammar school, so he went to a vocational centre. They had no books at home, but the contradiction in what was taught at the centre existed even then, so Saramago could study French and take a course in literature. His discovery of the poet, Ricardo Reis, (an alias) sparked what was to consume his life, but only bloom later following the fall of the fascist regime. He frequented public libraries and literary events, worked as a mechanic and then as an administrator in social welfare. A major influence on Saramago was his grandfather, an illiterate landless pig farmer who would tell him folk tales that stimulated his imagination and ability to tell tales that transcend magic-realism. There is a significant context to Jose Saramago's writing: first, until he was 50 Portugal was the dictatorship led by Antnio Salazar (1889-1970); and second, he became, in 1969, a committed Marxian socialist and communist.
