José Saramago, 1922–2010

José Saramago never denied that his long, difficult sentences and mystical digressions could vex a reader. “Probably I’m an essay writer who, as he doesn’t know how to write essays, writes novels instead,” he said in 2002. Yet his novels were translated into 25 languages, and in 1998 he became Portugal’s only Nobel Prize–winning novelist, garnering praise from the Nobel committee for his “multifaceted” writing and its “skillfully evoked atmosphere of unreality.”

Born into a poor family in Azinhaga, a village 62 miles from Lisbon, Saramago graduated from trade school and worked as a mechanic while he studied literature “mostly on his own,” said Bloomberg News. In the 1940s he published his first novel, but soon abandoned fiction writing, a withdrawal that lasted 19 years. “I had nothing worthwhile to say,” he later wrote.

Saramago joined the Communist Party during the fascist dictatorship of António Salazar, when being a communist “meant taking huge risks,” said the London Guardian. He ended his long friendship with Fidel Castro in 2003, saying Castro had “cheated my dreams.” But Saramago retained his “fierce anticlericalism” and was a political provocateur at home and abroad. “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.”

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Literary success came late in Saramago’s life, said Reuters.com, beginning with a 1982 novel that was published in English, in 1988, as Baltasar and Blimunda. In 1992, he went into self-imposed exile, moving to the Canary Islands after Portugal’s government excluded his novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, from consideration for a literary prize. Saramago’s lyrical style, “weaving together fantasy, Portuguese history, and attacks on political repression and poverty,” led to comparisons with such Latin American writers as Gabriel García Márquez. But he denied any such influences. “European literature doesn’t need to borrow magic realism and fantasy from Latin America,” he said. “Any country can have its own magic realism roots.”