José Saramago Biography Family History Style Quotes

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He currently lives on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. Saramago has been a member of the Communist Party of Portugal since 1969, as well as an atheist and self-described pessimist - his positions have aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, the American literary critic Harold Bloom named Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today." Referring to him as "the master," he said he's "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre."

1 Biography

1.1 Family History

Saramago's father was José de Sousa and his mother was Maria da Piedade. De Souza served in World War I. He was a farmer, but moved his family to LisbonLisbon (in Portuguese, Lisboa is the capital and largest city of Portugal. It is the seat of the district of Lisbon. Geography and Location Lisbon is situated at 38 degrees, 43 minutes north, and 9 degrees, 8 mintes west. It is located in the west of the in 1924 and became a policeman. Saramago's two-year-old brother, Francisco, died within a few months of the move to Lisbon.

Saramago married Ilda Reis in 1944. Their only child, Violante, was born in 1947.

2 Style

Saramago tends to write long sentences, using punctuation that most of us have been taught is incorrect. He uses no quotation marks to delimit dialog. Many of his "sentences" can be a page long or more, as he uses commas where most writers would place periods. Many of his paragraphs match the length of some authors' chapters. Surprisingly, it does not take most readers long to become adjusted to reading his unique style of prose.

3 Quotes

On the US$950,000 nobel prize that he recently won: "This prize is for all speakers of Portuguese, but while we're on the subject, I shall keep the money."

4 Bibliography

5 Claims of anti-Semitism

Commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Saramago recently stated that Jews no longer deserve "sympathy for the suffering they went through during the Holocaust. . . . Living under the shadows of the Holocaust and expecting to be forgiven for anything they do on behalf of what they have suffered seems abusive to me. They didn't learn anything from the suffering of their parents and grandparents." The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish civil-rights group, has characterized these remarks as being anti-Semitic. To wit, Abraham Foxman, director of the ADL stated, "Jose Saramago's comments are incendiary, deeply offensive, and show an ignorance of the issues that suggest a bias against the Jews." [1]

However, Saramago claimed his comments were directed at the state of Israel's policies against the Palestinians. He has claimed that Israel cannot validly claim to represent world Jewry and that it has used the claim of anti-Semitism to undermine genuine criticism of actions that cannot be justified, and would not be accepted were they those of any other state in the Middle East.

6 References

Portuguese Nobel Laureate's Remarks on Jews and the Holocaust Are "Incendiary and Offensive" (ADL Press Release, October 15, 2003).

Saramago, José Saramago, José Saramago, José

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