Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
a file on a figure who represents, well, maybe
the single greatest statistical anomaly in the
history of literature. That's a big claim, but
I think you might be right. I mean, usually when
we talk about Nobel Prize winners, we're talking
about a certain... A certain kind of person.
There's a path. Oh, absolutely. The classic ivory
tower trajectory. You know, university educations,
literary salons, lives spent in libraries surrounded
by first editions. Right. A life of the mind
from day one. But today we're talking about a
man who, and this isn't a metaphor, quite literally
had grease under his fingernails for a significant
portion of his adult life. Yeah. We are talking
about Jose Saramago. The first and so far the
only. Portuguese language writer to win the Nobel
Prize in literature. And the journey to get there
is, frankly, baffling. If you pitch this as a
movie script, it just wouldn't get made. Hollywood
would reject it. They'd say it's unrealistic.
A landless peasant who trains as a locksmith
and a mechanic, who then stops writing for nearly
30 years, and then in his 60s becomes a global
literary superstar. It just, it doesn't happen.
It sounds like one of his own parables. And that
is exactly our mission for this deep dive. We've
got a stack of sources here, biographies, critical
essays, his own journals. And we really need
to answer one specific question. How does it
happen? How does a car mechanic become the man
who writes, as the Nobel Committee put it, parables
sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony?
How does that specific background create that
very specific and, let's be honest, often difficult
genius? It's a great question. I think it starts
with the name itself. You really can't understand
Saramago without understanding that his very
identity began as a mistake. A mistake. A bureaucratic
error rooted in, well, in poverty and maybe a
little bit of wine. This is the wild radish story.
I read this and I had to read it again because
I thought I must have misunderstood. It feels
almost too perfect for a writer who spent his
whole life critiquing bureaucracy. So walk us
through how he actually got his name. Okay, so
let's set the scene. It's 1922. We're in a tiny,
tiny village called Azinhaga in the Ribateo province
of Portugal. And we need to be clear about what
this place was like. We're not talking about
a wealthy region. No, not at all. This is deeply
rural, deeply poor. His father is José de Sousa.
The family are landless peasants, which is, you
know, the bottom of the economic ladder. Right.
And in this village, like in many poor communities,
families had nicknames to distinguish them from
each other because there were probably a dozen
other de Sousa families. And these nicknames
weren't always complimentary. Almost never. They
were often quite derogatory. And his father's
family was known by the nickname Saramagos. Okay,
and Saramago isn't just a random sound. It means
something very specific in Portuguese, doesn't
it? It does. It refers to the plant Rathanus
raffinistrum, the wild radish. The wild radish.
It's a weed. Basically, a weed that grows in
the fields. And historically, in times of famine,
it was gathered and eaten. It was considered
poor man's food. So calling someone a Saramago.
It was essentially calling them a weed. It was
a slur about their poverty. It was a constant
reminder that they were the people who were just
barely scraping by, the ones who had to eat the
weeds from the fields. Oh, wow. That gives it
a real sting. Okay, so his father, Jose de Sousa,
goes to the registry office to record the birth
of his son. And the clerk of the registry was,
by all accounts, either incredibly careless or,
more likely, a bit drunk. As you do. The sources
suggest he might have had a bit too much wine.
Which, you know, wasn't exactly uncommon in village
administration back then. So when he sat down
to write the baby's name in the ledger, he didn't
just write Jose de Sousa. He ad -libbed. He took
it upon himself to add the insulting village
nickname. He officially wrote down Jose de Sousa
Saramago. And the family had no idea. None. They
didn't find out for years. Not until he was seven
years old and had to present his official identification
papers for primary school. Oh my god, imagine
that moment. Imagine the shock. You think your
name is one thing your entire childhood, and
then some state official tells you, no, actually,
your legal surname is this insult that people
in the village use behind your back. That feels
like the first Saramago moment before he ever
wrote a single word. It's this crisis of identity,
this absurdity imposed on him by a faceless,
careless bureaucrat. A drunk bureaucrat, no less.
You can just see how that would plant a seed
of deep skepticism about authority, about official
documents, about the truth as it's written down
by the state. It's almost Kafkaesque, but in
this rural Portuguese setting. It is. It's the
perfect origin story. But what's amazing is how
he reclaimed it. He took the name of the weed,
the name of the peasant food, and he made it
the most prestigious name in all of Portuguese
literature. He wore it like a badge of honor.
Absolutely. It kept him grounded. He never, ever
let people forget that he came from the earth,
from those wild radish roots. It became his way
of saying, I am not one of the elites. I am not
from the academy. I am one of you. So let's dig
into those roots a little bit more in Section
1, because that poverty wasn't just, you know,
a colorful backstory. It dictated the entire
trajectory of his life, especially his education.
It was completely deterministic. He's born in
1922. The family moves to Lisbon in 1924 so his
dad can get a job as a policeman. But even then.
They're not living the high life. Oh, far from
it. They were still struggling immensely, living
in cramped quarters, just getting by. And this
leads to the first major, major divergence in
his life path from what you expect. He was a
good student. He was a brilliant student. By
all accounts, his grades were excellent. He was
sharp. He was curious. In any normal timeline
for a future Nobel laureate, he goes to grammar
school, what they call the LISO, and then on
to university. That's the path. That's the path.
His parents literally could not afford the fees
for the grammar school. Wow. So it was purely
economic. Purely. It wasn't about talent or aptitude.
It was about money. And this is that sliding
doors moment. Because of a lack of funds, the
door to the humanities, to a classical education,
slams shut in his face. And in its place, the
door to the trade school opens. Exactly. At age
12, he's sent to a technical school. And the
curriculum isn't Latin philosophy and literature.
It's metalworking. It's mechanics. He's being
trained not to think, but to do. He's being trained
to be a laborer, to work with his hands. Which
he does. He graduates. And for two years, he
works as a car mechanic. I just, I can't get
over that image. Fixing transmissions, changing
oil. It's incredible. But, and this is the detail
I absolutely love, the thing that shows the writer
was always in there. He spends his nights haunting
the public library in Lisbon. So he's got two
lives. Grease -stained hands by day, ink -stained
hands by night. It's a beautiful image, isn't
it? He didn't have a syllabus. He didn't have
a professor telling him what to read. He just
had a library card and this voracious, untamed
curiosity. He was autodidactic in the purest
sense of the word. Just reading whatever he could
get his hands on. Randomly, voraciously. And
I honestly think that that lack of a formal academic
training is what saved him. in a way. It's what
made his style so unique. Oh, so? Because he
wasn't taught how to write by a professor. He
wasn't told what the rules were, so he didn't
have the same fear of breaking them. He learned
by absorbing the rhythm of the masters on his
own terms while his day job was all about the
physical, tangible world. That combination is
potent. But there is a very specific emotional
anchor from this time, something that feels more
important than any book he could have read. We
have to talk about the grandfather story. The
sources all highlight this as maybe the definitive
Saramago moment. It is the absolute key to his
emotional landscape, to who he was as a man and
as a writer. So he would spend his holidays back
in the village, as in Haga, with his grandparents,
Geronimo and Josefa. And these were not literary
people. These were illiterate pig farmers. And
when I say pig farmers, I mean they were so poor
that in the winter they would bring the piglets
inside and sleep with them in their own bed to
keep them from freezing to death. That shows
such an intense proximity between human and animal
life. There's no separation there, no sense of
superiority. None whatsoever. It's all just life
trying to survive. But the pivotal moment comes
when Geronimo, his grandfather, suffers a stroke.
He's an old man and it's serious. He needs to
go to Lisbon for surgery. And Geronimo, this
rough, uneducated, illiterate peasant, he understands
the truth of the situation with perfect clarity.
He knows he's going to Lisbon to die. He's not
coming back to the farm. He's facing his own
mortality. So what does he do? Does he go to
the church? No. He doesn't go to the church to
pray. He doesn't write a will. He has nothing
to leave and can't write anyway. He does something
else. He goes out into the yard into a small
plot of land. There are fig trees and olive trees
there that he has planted and tended his entire
life. And he goes to each tree one by one. He
wraps his arms around their trunks. He embraces
them and he cries. He is saying goodbye to the
trees. That is, it's just an incredibly cinematic
image, but also so deeply spiritual in a way
that's completely non -religious. It's like he's
thanking the earth itself for sustaining him.
It's a communion. And the young Sarah Margo witnessed
this. He saw it with his own eyes. And he later
wrote a sentence that I think explains everything
about him. He said, to see this, to live this,
if that doesn't mark you for the rest of your
life, you have no feeling. Wow. It wasn't just
a sad goodbye for him. It was a profound lesson.
It taught him where true value lies, not in abstractions,
not in God or heaven, but in the tangible world.
It explains so much about his later work, doesn't
it? You see that theme constantly, that the most
profound human experiences are physical, not
abstract. They're about the earth, the body,
the immediate, touchable reality. It's a kind
of materialist spirituality. He didn't need a
cathedral. He had the olive tree. That groundedness,
that connection to the physical is what prevented
his later high concept novels from just floating
away into pure fantasy. Even when he's writing
about impossible things, the emotions are as
solid and real as that tree trunk. It gave him
a kind of litmus test for truth. Does this feel
as real as my grandfather hugging those trees?
Speaking of his writing, we have to address what
I call the great gap. Because usually a writer
starts young, they struggle, they publish a few
things, they slowly build a career. Saramago
published his first novel, Land of Sin, in 1947.
He was 24. And then... Crickets. Nothing. Silence.
Absolute literary silence, at least in terms
of novels, for almost 30 years. It's unheard
of. Why? What happened? Did he just give up?
Did he think he was a failure after that first
book? It wasn't really failure so much as a moment
of profound self -awareness. He famously said
later, I had nothing worth saying. That takes
a lot of humility. Can you imagine the self -awareness
required for that? To realize that you have the
technical skill to write sentences, but not yet
the wisdom or the life experience to write a
meaningful novel. So he stopped. And he lived.
He got other jobs. He worked in the civil service.
He worked in a publishing house as a production
manager. He became a journalist and a translator.
He lived through the Salazar dictatorship, the
Estado Novo. He basically just let life fill
up the reservoir. It's a great lesson for late
bloomers everywhere. He didn't really have his
major breakthrough until Balthazar and Blumunda
in 1982. He was 60 years old. 60. Most people
are starting to think about their retirement
plans. Saramago was just starting his literary
revolution. And because he waited, he arrived
fully formed. He didn't have to experiment in
public. When he returned to the novel, he brought
that distinctive, difficult... mesmerizing style
that he's famous for. He had spent decades listening
to the way people really talk, working with official
documents, seeing the absurdities of bureaucracy
from the inside. All of that experience poured
directly into his style. Okay, let's transition
right there. Let's talk about that style. Section
two, what I like to call the wall of text. Because
if you're a new reader and you pick up blindness
or the stone raft, the first thing you notice
is that it looks, well, it looks terrifying to
read. It is visually dense. There's no other
way to put it. You open the page and you see
these huge, solid blocks of text. Very little
white space. It looks like a brick of words.
And the punctuation. Or the lack of it. It's
like he has a personal vendetta against quotation
marks. It really does feel that way. He called
his own method just enough punctuation. He essentially
eliminates almost all the standard conventions
of dialogue that we're used to. No quotation
marks. No quotation marks. No new paragraphs
when a new speaker begins. No semicolons. No
em dashes to indicate a speaker. So how on earth
do you know who is talking? You have to listen.
You have to pay incredibly close attention to
the rhythm of the language. He separates different
clauses, including dialogue, with commas. The
only visual cue you get that the speaker has
changed is a capital letter immediately following
a comma. So it would read something like, Hello,
how are you? I am doing fine, thank you. Where
are you going today? I am going to the market.
All in one long, flowing, run -on sentence. Exactly
that. And sometimes those sentences can run for
pages, not just paragraphs, but entire pages.
Okay, so the big question. Is this just him being
difficult? Is it a kind of literary gatekeeping,
a barrier to entry? Because frankly, it kept
me away from his books for a long time. It definitely
acts as a filter. There's no doubt about that.
It demands a lot from the reader. But it's not
a gimmick. It's actually an invitation. An invitation
to what? An invitation to experience language
differently. Yeah. Saramago himself, and most
critics agree, explained that this style mimics
oral storytelling. Ah, like listening to someone
tell a story. Precisely. Think about when you're
telling a story to a friend over dinner. You
don't say open quote and close quote. You don't
pause for a paragraph break. Your voice just
flows. The narrator's voice seamlessly blends
into the character's voices and back again. So
it creates this continuous stream of consciousness.
I'd call it more of a river of consciousness.
And you, the reader, you have to jump into that
current and just let it carry you. You can't
stop and start easily. It forces a state of total
immersion. You can't be distracted while reading
it. You can't. And that's intentional. The critic
James Wood had a great description of Saramago's
narrator. He said the voice is like someone both
wise and ignorant. We are figuring things out
with the narrator in real time. It creates this
profound intimacy. Because you have to be paid
such close attention just to follow the dialogue,
you become deeply, deeply invested in the characters'
voices. It also has a huge effect on how we view
the characters themselves, doesn't it? Especially
in a book like Blindness, which we'll get to
in more detail later. Yeah. He takes it a step
further and stops using proper names entirely.
Yes. That's another layer of his technique. In
blindness, there is no John or Mary. There is
the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with
the dark glasses, the old man with the black
eye patch, the boy with the squint. It feels
like a fable or a myth. Like we've stepped out
of modern specific times and into something more
ancient and universal. That's precisely the point.
It universalizes them. If you give a character
a specific name, a specific job, a specific address,
they become a specific person in a specific city.
But if you call her the doctor's wife... She
could be anyone. She could be your neighbor.
She could be you. It strips the character down
to their essential human condition. Yes. And
it fits perfectly with his themes of urban alienation.
That in modern life, we are often just functions
bumping into each other. We are our jobs or our
most physical characteristic. But by the end
of the book, by forcing you to know them only
by these labels, you come to care about the doctor's
wife more deeply than you care about fully named
characters in other books. It's a brilliant paradox.
OK, so we have the peasant. roots, the long 30
-year gap, and this dense, oral, challenging
style. Now we need to look at what he actually
wrote with that style. Section three, the major
works. Because his premises are, well, they're
wild. They're completely out there. They are
what -if questions taken to their absolute logical
extreme. He's often lumped in with the magical
realism movement, you know, with writers like
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But I think Saramago
is doing something quite different. He isn't
really writing magic. He's writing logic puzzles.
He takes one single impossible premise and then
applies rigorous, almost scientific logic to
it to see what happens. Let's start with the
one that really broke him through internationally.
Balthazar and Blamunda, published in 1982. This
is the one that really put him on the map. And
on the surface, it's a historical novel. but
it's twisted through his unique lens. It's set
in 18th century Lisbon during the height of the
Inquisition. So the backdrop is incredibly dark.
Very dark. You have the auto de fe, people being
publicly burned at the stake for heresy. It's
a brutal, oppressive world. But at its heart,
the story is a romance. It's about Balthazar,
a soldier who lost his left hand in the war,
and Blumunda, a young woman who has a very special
power. She's a clairvoyant, right? She can see
things others can't. Specifically. If she hasn't
eaten breakfast yet, if she's fasting, she can
look at people and see their wills inside their
bodies. Not their future, but their inner essence,
their life force, which appears to her as a dark
cloud. Wow, okay. And somehow this connects to
a priest who wants to build a flying machine.
That's the third part of the triangle. They get
involved with a renegade priest, Bartolome de
Guzman, who dreams of flight. And this is actually
based on a real historical footnote. There was
a priest who designed an airship called the Passarola.
But Saramago takes that historical fact and asks
the magical question. He asks, OK, but how does
it fly? And in the book, the machine is powered
by these wills that Blamunda harvests from people.
It flies on human desires, this beautiful, strange,
incredible mix of historical grit and metaphysical
fantasy. It sounds like he's trying to rewrite
history to include the people who are usually
left out, the maimed soldiers, the women with
strange gifts, the dreamers. That is exactly
what he's doing. He's subverting the great man
theory of history. The official story of that
time is that the king is building the massive
convent of Mafra. But Saramago ignores the king
and focuses on the thousands of anonymous laborers
who are hauling the stones, dying in the process.
It's a very Marxist retelling of history, but
done through the language of a fairy tale. OK,
let's move forward a few years to the stone raft
from 1986. I think this might be the funniest
and also the most weirdly prophetic concept he
ever came up with. It is absolutely brilliant.
The premise is geological, but all of the implications
are political. The book begins when a crack suddenly
appears in the earth along the Pyrenees Mountains.
The border between Spain and France. And the
entire Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal,
physically breaks off from the rest of Europe.
And it just, it floats away. It becomes a giant
stone raft drifting aimlessly out into the Atlantic
Ocean. It's basically Brexit before Brexit even
existed as a concept, but it's literal. Laughs.
It is. It's uncanny. But for Sarah Mago, it was
all about identity. He was a lifelong proponent
of something called Iberian federalism. He believed
that Spain and Portugal had much more in common
culturally and historically with each other and
with their former colonies in South America and
Africa than they did with France, Germany, and
the rest of Europe. They were the periphery looking
in. Exactly. So by floating the entire landmass
away, he forces the characters and the reader
to ask, who are we if we are not European? What
is our identity if we are just us? Its geography
has destiny completely rewritten. It's such a
playful way to tackle a really serious political
and philosophical question. Instead of writing
a dry political manifesto about the EU, he writes
this absurd, fantastic story about a country
sailing away. And that is the Saramago method
in a nutshell. Use the impossible to reveal something
profoundly real. Then you have The Year of the
Death of Ricardo Reis from 1984. This one feels
a little more, I don't know, inside baseball
for literature fans, but the central concept
is just so trippy. It's a metafictional masterpiece.
And to get it, you have to know a little bit
about Fernando Pessoa, who was the other giant
of 20th century Portuguese literature. Pessoa,
who had all the alter egos. Exactly. He didn't
just use pseudonyms. He created what he called
heteronyms, entirely separate authorial personalities
with their own biographies, writing styles, even
astrological charts. One of the most famous was
Ricardo Reis. And in Saramago's book, this fictional
person outlives his own creator. That's the premise.
The real author, Fernando Pessoa, dies in 1935.
But his creation, his heteronym Ricardo Reis,
somehow survives for one more year and returns
to Lisbon. It becomes this incredible ghost story
about literature itself. Race wanders the city,
which is on the brink of fascism, and has long
conversations with the ghost of Pessoa. So he's
asking what's more real, the flesh and blood
author who dies or the character who lives on
forever in the minds of readers? Exactly. It's
Saramago having this profound imaginative conversation
with his literary ancestors, questioning the
very nature of reality in fiction. But the big
one, the one that probably got most of you listening
interested in Saramago in the first place, is
Blindness from 1995. And Sayo Sobere Sagira.
Yes. This is the heavy hitter. This is the book
that usually hooks people for life or turns them
away forever. There's not much middle ground.
The premise is terrifyingly simple. A mysterious
plague of blindness suddenly strikes an entire
city. But it's not darkness. It's white blindness.
A milky sea of white, as he describes it. It's
a blindness that illuminates rather than darkens,
which is a terrifying idea in itself. And it
spreads like a virus through sight. Right. One
man goes blind in his car at a traffic light.
The man who tries to help him drive home goes
blind. The ophthalmologist who treats him goes
blind. It's instantaneous and inexplicable. And
the government, in its wisdom, panics. They round
up the first victims and anyone they've had contact
with, and they throw them into a disgusting,
abandoned, insane asylum to quarantine them.
And things go full Lord of the Flies almost immediately.
It is a brutal, unflinching examination of the
fragility of civilization. Saramago is asking
a very simple question. How many missed meals,
how many days without sight, are we away from
becoming animals? And the answer is, not many.
Not many at all. Inside the asylum... Society
completely collapses. Gangs form, food is hoarded,
women are systematically abused in exchange for
food, sanitation disappears. It is visceral and
disgusting. And he does not spare the reader
any of the horrifying details of the filth and
degradation. But there is a single point of light
in all this darkness. The doctor's wife. The
only person in the entire world, it seems, who
keeps her sight. And she fakes being blind so
she can go into the quarantine with her husband.
She becomes the witness. She carries the terrible
burden of seeing the horror when no one else
can. It's a story about responsibility, then.
If you are the one who can see, you are obligated
to help those who can't. It is. It strikes that
perfect Saramago balance between total pessimism
about society as a whole and a deep abiding optimism
about the capacity of certain individuals for
love and compassion. That's the Saramago paradox
right there. It is. He's a self -confessed pessimist
who believed that love was the only thing that
could save us. He believed that when you strip
away all the institutions, the police, the government,
you are left with a raw human animal. And that
animal is capable of the most profound cruelty,
but also the most profound tenderness. And then
just to show he could, he flipped the entire
script again in 2005 with death with interruptions.
Instead of a plague of blindness, you get a plague
of immortality. Death takes a holiday. That's
the premise. In an unnamed country, on midnight
of January 1st, people just stop dying. Which
on the surface sounds like paradise. The ultimate
human dream achieved. You would think so. But
Saramago is a master of logistics. He's not interested
in the philosophical idea. He's interested in
the practical consequences. So what happens?
Chaos. If no one dies, what happens to the hospitals?
They fill up with people in permanent comas in
the final stages of terminal illness just suspended.
What happens to the funeral homes and the life
insurance companies? They go bankrupt overnight.
Families are stuck taking care of ancient, decrepit
relatives who just will not pass on. And what
happens to the church, to religion? That's the
big one. That's his real target. The church panics.
Because without death, there is no resurrection.
Without resurrection, there is no Christianity.
The entire philosophical and theological foundation
crumbles. It's an incredibly witty and savage
satire of bureaucracy, religion, and politics.
And speaking of satirizing religion and politics,
we cannot talk about Saramago for this long without
getting into the weeds on the trouble he caused.
This man was a magnet for controversy. So let's
move into section four, the provocateur. He didn't
just court controversy. He saw it as his civic
duty. He was not a writer who was content to
hide away in his study. He was out in the street,
metaphorically and literally. Let's start with
his politics. He wasn't a casual, you know, champagne
socialist. No. He joined the Portuguese Communist
Party in 1969. And we have to remember the context
here. This was under the fascist Estado Novo
dictatorship of Salazar. Joining the Communist
Party wasn't just a political preference. It
was an illegal, subversive act. It was dangerous.
You could be arrested, tortured or disappeared
by the PID, the secret police. And he remained
a member of the party until the day he died.
He described himself as a libertarian communist,
which. That sounds like a contradiction in terms
to a lot of people. It does. But for him, it
meant a commitment to Marxist economic principles
combined with a deep skepticism of the authoritarian
state power, like what he saw in the Soviet Union.
He was a very heterodox communist. But there
was a specific incident early on in 1975 that
kind of haunts his reputation. The hot summer.
Right. So after the Carnation Revolution in 1974
overthrew the dictatorship, Portugal was in complete
political chaos. There was a real power struggle
between the moderate socialists and the hardline
communists. And Saramago was, at that time, the
assistant director of a major newspaper, Diário
de Notícias. And the paper became a mouthpiece
for the hard left. It did. And in that highly
charged atmosphere, there was a purge. A purge
of journalists. Yes. 24 journalists at the paper
who were seen as bourgeois or right wing were
publicly denounced and expelled. And Saramago,
as part of the leadership, was deeply implicated
in that purge. He was seen by many as the enforcer
of the party line. So he was actively involved
in suppressing dissenting voices. That is the
accusation. And it's a serious one. He later
claimed he didn't order it directly, but he certainly
supported the political environment that allowed
it to happen. It was a revolutionary time and
he was a revolutionary. But it's a black mark
for many. And the irony is it backfired on him
completely. Totally. When a far left coup failed
in November 1975, the political pendulum swung
back hard the other way. Saramago was unceremoniously
fired from the newspaper. Which, bizarrely, is
the only reason he became the novelist we know
today. He got fired from his day job and had
nothing else to do. Exactly. It's one of history's
great ironies. If the Communist Revolution had
actually succeeded, we might never have gotten
Blindness or The Stone Raft. We would have just
had Saramago, the newspaper editor. Instead,
he was unemployed in his mid -50s and decided,
OK, I'm finally going to dedicate myself to literature.
But that political controversy, as intense as
it was, really pales in comparison to the religious
one. He was a militant, outspoken atheist. In
1991, he dropped a cultural bomb called The Gospel,
according to Jesus Christ. This was the absolute
turning point of his life. In this book, he doesn't
just satirize the church. He rewrites the New
Testament from a humanistic perspective. And
he humanizes Jesus to an extent that the Catholic
Church found profoundly blasphemous. What were
the specific things that triggered them so badly?
Oh, where to begin? Well, for starters, in his
telling, Jesus is conceived not by the Holy Spirit
alone, but because Joseph has a dream and mixes
his blood with the earth. Jesus later lives with
Mary Magdalene as his lover. But the biggest,
most unforgivable sin in the eyes of the church
is the portrayal of God. God is the villain of
the peace. God is depicted as a cruel, vain,
manipulative power broker. There is a famous
shocking scene where God and the devil are in
a boat with Jesus floating in a sea of mist.
And God explains his grand design to Jesus. He
explains that he needs Jesus to die to found
a great religion. And he needs that religion
to have martyrs and inquisitions and holy wars
so that his power can expand across the earth.
Wow. And Jesus is horrified. He tries to back
out. He tries to quit the crucifixion to refuse
his role in this bloody plan. So he challenges
God's morality. Yes. The book portrays the divine
as capricious and cruel and the human, Jesus,
as the one with true compassion. It's a total
inversion of the official story. I can imagine
the Catholic Church in a deeply Catholic country
like Portugal was not amused. They were absolutely
furious. But the real issue wasn't the church's
reaction. It was the government's reaction. This
leads to the infamous censorship incident of
1992. Right. The book was nominated to be on
the shortlist for the European Aristotelian Prize,
a huge literary honor. But the conservative Portuguese
government, led by Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco
Silva, took an unprecedented step. They used
their veto power to physically remove the book
from the list of candidates. A government actively
blocking its own country's most famous writer
from winning a prestigious European award. Yes.
Coaco Silva went on the record and said the book
was religiously offensive and that it did not
represent the values of Portugal. He essentially
said, we are a Catholic nation and this book
is an embarrassment to us. That is just stunning.
It's state censorship, plain and simple, in a
modern European democracy. Saramago was beyond
devastated. He felt profoundly betrayed by his
own homeland. He gave this heartbreaking press
conference where he basically said, I have been
stabbed in the back. I cannot live in a country
that treats its writers this way. So he packed
his bags. He went into exile. A self -imposed
voluntary exile. He and his wife. Pilar del Rio,
moved to the island of Lanzarote in the Canary
Islands, which is Spanish territory. He lived
there for the rest of his life. He never lived
in Portugal again. He just walked away. That
shows an incredible amount of conviction. Or
stubbornness. He was a famously stubborn man.
But he saw it as a fundamental principle of artistic
freedom. But he didn't stop being provocative,
even from his island exile. He got himself into
massive trouble again in 2002, this time on the
international stage, regarding Israel and Palestine.
This was perhaps his most inflammatory moment
of all. He visited the city of Ramallah during
the height of the Second Intifada as part of
a delegation of international writers. He was
horrified by what he saw, the Israeli military
presence, the checkpoints, the destruction. And
he made a public statement. He did. And he made
a comparison that you just don't make. He compared
the situation in the Palestinian territories
to Auschwitz. Oh, OK. That is the third rail
of any political commentary. You do not make
that comparison lightly. It sparked a global
firestorm of outrage. Jewish organizations around
the world condemned him. He gave an interview
where he said the Jewish people were endlessly
scratching their own wound to keep it bleeding,
and they showed to the world as if it were a
banner. He was widely accused of anti -Semitism.
Did he ever retract it or apologize? Not really.
He clarified it, but he didn't back down. Yeah.
He said later that he obviously didn't mean Romulo
was literally a death camp with gas chambers.
He called that interpretation stupid. But he
insisted that the spirit of Auschwitz, what he
saw as the spirit of exclusion, of dehumanization,
of collective punishment, was present there.
He admitted he did it on purpose, right? He did.
He said he intentionally wanted to put my finger
in the Auschwitz wound. because he knew it was
the only way to get a powerful reaction, to force
people to look. He believed the writer's job
is not to be liked, is to be a gadfly, to shake
people out of their complacency. He didn't care
if you called him an anti -Semite or a Stalinist.
He cared if you were listening. He felt that
as a citizen with a global microphone, he had
a moral obligation to scream about what he saw
as injustice, even if he was clumsy or offensive
in how he did it. And yet... Despite all the
powerful enemies he made, the church, his own
government, the pro -Israel lobby, the literary
world eventually had to bow down. Which brings
us to section five, the Nobel Prize. 1998, the
ultimate validation. Where was he when he found
out the story is so perfect? It's the most mundane
setting for such a life -changing event. He was
at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. He wasn't
even at an event. He was literally in the airport,
about to board a plane to go home to Lanzarote.
Just a regular traveler at an airport date. And
suddenly his phone rings, and he's a Nobel laureate
in literature. The committee's citation praised
his parables sustained by imagination, compassion,
and irony. Which is just the perfect summary
of his work. But even the prize itself was controversial.
It wasn't universally celebrated. The Vatican
issued an official statement criticizing the
award. They called it ideologically slanted.
Yeah, they just couldn't let it go. Never. But
Saramago's response to the Vatican is one of
my favorite quotes of all time. It's classic
Saramago. He just shrugged and said, the Vatican
is easily scandalized. They should just focus
on their prayers and leave people in peace. Focus
on your prayers. It's so beautifully, brutally
dismissive. It shows his confidence by that point.
He had the Nobel Prize. He didn't need their
approval or anyone's approval anymore. We should
take a moment to talk about the person who was
with him through all of this turmoil. His second
wife, Pilar Gavrio. a crucial, crucial figure
in his later life. She was a Spanish journalist,
27 years younger than him. They met in the mid
-80s and married in 1988. And she wasn't just
his partner. No, she was his professional partner,
too. She became his official translator into
Spanish. And that was huge. That's what opened
up the massive Latin American market to him and
really helped make him a global phenomenon. That's
such an intimate partnership. She's literally
translating his thoughts, his unique voice into
her own native tongue. She was fiercely intelligent
and fiercely protective of him and his legacy.
because he lived in exile in Lanzarote in a Spanish
-speaking environment. She was really his bridge
to the daily world. There's a wonderful documentary
about their later years called Jose and Pilar,
and you really see this dynamic. He's the grumpy,
pessimistic genius, and she's this force of nature,
this whirlwind of energy, managing his life and
keeping the world at bay so he could write. And
he kept writing right up until the very end.
There's actually a fascinating story about a
lost novel that really connects back to his early
days of struggle. Scleroboia, which means skylight.
He wrote this novel back in the 1950s during
that long, silent gap. He was unknown, unpublished.
And he sent the manuscript to a publisher in
Lisbon. And they ghosted him. Completely. Never
replied. Not a rejection letter, not a phone
call, just absolute silence. He never heard a
word. So what happened to it? He moved on with
his life and forgot about it. Decades later,
in the 1990s, when he's world famous, the publishing
house is moving offices and someone finds this
old dusty manuscript in a drawer. They realize
what it is and they call him up all excited,
basically saying, hey, we found this lost masterpiece.
We'd love to publish it now. I bet they would.
That's a guaranteed international bestseller
right there. And Saramago said no. He turned
them down. He flat out refused to publish it
during his lifetime. It was a matter of dignity
and principle. He basically told them, you ignored
me for 40 years. I will not give you the satisfaction
of profiting from me now. He stipulated that
it could only be released after his death. Wow.
He held a grudge for half a century. That is
an impressive level of commitment. He was a man
of very strong principles. Yeah. And pride. He
died in 2010 at his home in Lanzarote. From leukemia.
He was 87. And by all accounts, it was a very
peaceful end. The story is he had breakfast,
he chatted with Pilar for a while, said he felt
unwell, lay down, and just slipped away. But
the drama, the politics, it didn't end with his
death. Which brings us to our final section,
section six, the funeral. This really brings
the whole political story of his life to a head.
His body was flown back to Lisbon for a state
funeral. And it was a massive public event. The
reports say 20 ,000 people lined the streets
to pay their respects. But guess who didn't show
up? It has to be Anibal Cabaco Silva. The very
same man. The prime minister who censored his
book back in 1992 was now the president of the
Republic of Portugal. And he refused to attend
the funeral of his country's only Nobel laureate.
That is an incredible level of pettiness. He
released a statement saying he never had the
privilege to know him. the only Nobel winner
in your country's entire history, and you skip
the funeral because of a 20 -year -old beef over
a book. And the people on the streets noticed.
The mourners were holding red carnations, the
symbol of the 1974 revolution, the symbol of
the communism that Saramago championed. And they
were shouting at the official motorcades, asking
where the president was. It turned the funeral
into one final political protest. So even in
death, he was this figure dividing the establishment
from the people. Exactly. Yeah. But the burial
itself, that's the part that brings us full circle.
Yeah. Right back to Section 1 and his grandfather.
The olive tree. They buried his ashes in Lisbon
in the square in front of the Saramago Foundation
headquarters. But they didn't just put a tombstone
there. They went back to his home village of
Azinhaga. No way. Yes. They dug up a hundred
-year -old olive tree, transported it all the
way to Lisbon, and planted it directly over his
ashes. The same kind of tree his grandfather
embraced. The very same. So he rests in the heart
of the capital city, but he is under the roots
of his peasant history. He has literally returned
to the earth he came from. That's pure poetry.
It's the perfect ending. It honors the little
boy who watched his grandfather say goodbye to
the world by hugging a tree. It seals the entire
narrative. The wild radish returned to the earth.
So after all this, what is the final takeaway
here? We've looked at the mechanic, the communist,
the atheist, the Nobel winner. Who was this man?
I think the takeaway is all about the idea of
sight. Saramago once said, I think we are blind,
blind people who can see but do not see. And
his entire life's work was an attempt to make
us see. He stripped away the grammar to make
us really see the words. He stripped away the
proper names to make us see the people underneath.
He stripped away the comforting myths of religion
to make us see our own raw humanity. Exactly.
He challenges us. He forces us to look at what
he called the illusory reality, to stop accepting
the official story, whether that story comes
from the church or the state or even the basic
syntax of our own language, and to look at the
raw, messy, complicated, often ugly human truth
that's hiding underneath. He was a pessimist
who gave us the tools to understand our own darkness.
And in doing so, he offered a very strange and
difficult kind of hope. Because if we can truly
see the darkness, if we can look at it without
flinching, then maybe we have a chance to navigate
it. So for you listening, the challenge is pretty
simple. Pick up one of his books, but be warned,
it requires your full attention. Which one would
you say they should start with? I think if you
want the romance and the history. and the magic,
you start with Balthazar and Blumunda. If you
want the terrifying sociopolitical thriller that
will keep you up at night, it has to be Blindus.
And if you want to laugh at the absurdity of
bureaucracy, you pick up Death with Interruptions.
Or if you just want to see a whole country fall
apart and float away, which feels pretty relevant
these days, you go for The Stone Raft. Just don't
let that first page of dense text scare you off.
No. Once you find the rhythm, once you let yourself
fall into that river of his voice, you won't
want to stop. So go find an old olive tree, sit
down, and start reading. Thanks for diving deep
with us. It was a pleasure. We'll see you on
the next one.