“I
think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a
sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science,
philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.”
– Jose Saramago
Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize
Winner Saramago was born on this date in 1922 to a family of landless peasants
in a small rural village. “I had no
books at home,” Saramago said, “So, I started to frequent a public library in
Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that
my taste for reading developed and was refined.”
Many writers will tell you that the
love of reading was the first spark in their own creative world, and that is
definitely the case for Saramago, who was taken away from his grammar school
education at age 12 because his family was so poor they could not afford to
keep him in school. Sent to train to
become a mechanic, he continued to read everything he could get his hands on,
ultimately teaching himself to write both journalistically and creatively as
well.
After working as a car mechanic for two years,
he convinced the local newspaper, Diário de Notícias, to give him a
chance and eventually he worked his way up to assistant editor. His first books came out when he was in his
late 30s and 40s, but his first best seller didn’t come until at age 60 with the publication of Memorial
do Convento. A baroque tale set during the Inquisition in 18th-century
Lisbon. It tells of the love between a
maimed soldier and a young clairvoyant, and of a renegade priest's heretical
dream of flight. The book not only
established him as one of Portugal’s leading writers but also put him onto the
world writing scene.
He won the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1998.
In offering his formula to others
seeking to follow in his footsteps, 
he said simply, “I do not just write, I
write what I am. If there is a secret,
perhaps that is it.”
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