JOSÉ SARAMAGO no New York Times

José Saramago, Nobel Prize-Winning Portuguese Writer, Dies at 87

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.

(...) 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.

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.

(...) “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.”

Notícia completa: aqui

JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922-2010)

A Maior Flor do Mundo from Fundação Jose Saramago on Vimeo.

Sugestão: Prof. Paulo Mendes

JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922-2010)

Quando ele terminou, as mãos dela já não estavam frias, as suas ardiam, por isso foi que as mãos se deram às mãos e não se estranharam. Passava muito da uma hora da madrugada quando o violoncelista perguntou, Quer que chame um táxi para a levar ao hotel, e a mulher respondeu, Não, ficarei contigo, e ofereceu-lhe a boca. Entraram no quarto, despiram-se e o que estava escrito que aconteceria, aconteceu enfim, e outra vez, e outra ainda. Ele adormeceu, ela não. Então ela, a morte, levantou-se, abriu a bolsa que tinha deixado na sala e retirou a carta de cor violeta. Olhou em redor como se estivesse à procura de um lugar onde a pudesse deixar, sobre o piano, metida entre as cordas do violoncelo, ou então no próprio quarto, debaixo da almofada em que a cabeça do homem descansava. Não o fez. Saiu para a cozinha, acendeu um fósforo, um fósforo humilde, ela que poderia desfazer o papel com o olhar, reduzi-lo a uma impalpável poeira, ela que poderia pegar-lhe fogo só com o contacto dos dedos, e era um simples fósforo, o fósforo comum, o fósforo de todos os dias, que fazia arder a carta da morte, essa que só a morte podia destruir. Não ficaram cinzas. A morte voltou para a cama, abraçou-se ao homem e, sem compreender o que lhe estava a suceder, ela que nunca dormia, sentiu que o sono lhe fazia descair suavemente as pálpebras. No dia seguinte ninguém morreu».

José Saramago in As intermitências da morte.

 

 

Prof. Fernanda Afonso