By CHRIS GRAEME chris.graeme@theresidentgroup.com
No Portuguese writer since the April 25 Revolution had been so controversial and divisive.
An outspoken critic of the Catholic Church and an ardent life-long Marxist and atheist, José Saramago, who was the only Portuguese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was laid to rest on Sunday at Lisbon’s Alto de São João Cemetery.
More than 20,000 people turned out to accompany him on his last journey.An author and playwright of over 30 internationally best-selling books, including such works as The Stone Raft (1986) for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998, and An Essay on Blindness (1995), which was made into a box-office smash in 2008, José Saramago died on Friday at his home on the Spanish island of Lanzarote. He was 87.
The man who once described himself as a pessimist leaves a widow, Spanish journalist and translator Pilar del Rio, and his only daughter Violante Matos from his previous marriage to Ilda Reis.
The author’s last published work was Cain (Caim), which provoked a storm of controversy within the Catholic Church last year after stating that God was “revengeful and bad.” The dry and outspoken writer famously shocked Israeli academics and intellectuals in 2002 while visiting the Palestinian city of Ramallah where he expressed his views on the conditions there which were seen as anti-Semitic.
He also offended nationalistic sensibilities by suggesting that Portugal would be better off as part of Spain.
It was said that Saramago moved to Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, in the early 1990s following opposition from Portugal’s centre rightwing PSD Government and Prime Minister, Cavaco Silva, who objected to his work The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo), which was also excluded from the European Literary Prize in 1992 on the grounds that it was “offensive to Catholics”.
Controversial in death, as in life, Cavaco Silva, now President of the Republic, pointedly refused to break his family holidays in the Azores to fly back to Lisbon over the weekend and attend the funeral.
“I never had the privilege of knowing Saramago but all Portuguese know that I am in the Azores fulfi lling a promise that I made a long time ago to my family. I think that I have fulfi lled all of my obligations as President. What a Head of State should do and say is different from that of friends and colleagues,” he said.
José Saramago, who was born in 1922 into a humble family of landless peasants in the village of Azinhaga, published his fi rst book Country of Sin (Terra do Pecado) in 1947. After graduating from a technical collage in the late 1930s, Saramago worked as a car mechanic for two years.
He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and remained a member to the end of his life.
Working as a journalist and assistant editor, Saramago took an active role in the April 25 Revolution in 1974 when as the Director of Lisbon daily newspaper Diario de Noticias he famously told colleagues that those who weren’t “for the Revolution should pack up and leave”.
Shortly after, he sacked 24 journalists because they didn’t believe in his editorial policy, style and politics.
After working as a translator, it wasn’t until in his 50s that José Saramago returned to fi ction and won international acclaim with his 1987 fantasy Baltasar and Blimunda (Memorial do Convento) which won the Portuguese PEN Club Award. Other successes regularly followed.
When Saramago discovered he had been made Nobel Laureate in 1998, he allegedly told his publisher
“I was not born for all this glory.” Despite his international successes, Saramago was more famous outside Portugal as an author than inside. His prose style, which sometimes featured long sentences and sparing use of full stops and punctuation, was heavily intellectual, allegorical and difficult for many average readers to digest.
