Portugal has given the world two distinguished novelists. Eça de Queiros, is the Proust of Portugal. His masterpiece, The Maias, describes the decline of an aristocratic family in the late 19th century. Whereas Eça was a member of the Portuguese intellectual elite, José Saramago was born in a wretched shack in the the rural hamlet of Azinhaga. When he was two, his family moved to a series of two-roomed flats in the poorest quarters of Lisbon. I cannot think of any writer of consequence who endured such grinding poverty in his childhood and youth. His grandfather was a foundling and both he and his wife illiterate peasants. In an early essay I compared Saramago to Thomas Hardy, as a village boy who had made a career as a writer. This was a grave mistake. Hardy wrote his early novels in a comfortable cottage with a large garden, and his mother was a great reader.
Saramago’s parents were too poor to send him to secondary school. He trained as an engineer, taking jobs as a car mechanic and metal worker. In his early fifties he determined to make a living as a writer. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He had become a celebrity, a status he much enjoyed as an octogenarian married to a young, left-wing beauty. Most of his novels are fantasies, set in unidentifiable countries. In one such country, its inhabitants cease to die for seven months after New Year’s Day; in another, the Iberian peninsula floats out to sea. In Blindness, published in 1995, loss of sight becomes a universal, contagious disease. The blind, imprisoned by the government, grope about shitting all over the place. The filth and stench are awful.
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