Remembering José Saramago

Remembering José Saramago

Remembering José Saramago

Novelist José Saramago died today at the age of eighty-seven. In 1987, Irving Howe reviewed Saramago’s Baltasar and Blimunda, writing:

The most vigorous writing of recent years has come not from the great powers of the West but from small, impoverished and sometimes ”backward” countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe and parts of Africa. As if to confirm this trend, there has now arrived from Portugal a brilliant novel by José Saramago, a writer who is highly regarded in Portuguese-speaking countries but little known elsewhere….[A]part from its strong intrinsic interest, this novel should help put to rest the notion recently expressed in these and other pages that living in the wake of the heroic period of literary modernism dooms us to a literature of timid voices and small consequence.

Benjamin Kunkel offered his own assessment of Saramago in Dissent in 2001:

Writing in the face of the global market, he wants us to see, as in Blindness, that the most solitary and apparently independent of us in fact depend on the invisible cooperation of the greatest number of others; and to remind us, as in All the Names, of those many people whom an information age fails even to baptize. A political novelist of our time can hardly do more.