WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.600 Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening 00:00:02.600 --> 00:00:06.459 a file on a figure who represents, well, maybe 00:00:06.459 --> 00:00:09.679 the single greatest statistical anomaly in the 00:00:09.679 --> 00:00:12.660 history of literature. That's a big claim, but 00:00:12.660 --> 00:00:14.599 I think you might be right. I mean, usually when 00:00:14.599 --> 00:00:16.239 we talk about Nobel Prize winners, we're talking 00:00:16.239 --> 00:00:19.339 about a certain... A certain kind of person. 00:00:19.399 --> 00:00:22.120 There's a path. Oh, absolutely. The classic ivory 00:00:22.120 --> 00:00:25.100 tower trajectory. You know, university educations, 00:00:25.100 --> 00:00:28.660 literary salons, lives spent in libraries surrounded 00:00:28.660 --> 00:00:31.239 by first editions. Right. A life of the mind 00:00:31.239 --> 00:00:34.439 from day one. But today we're talking about a 00:00:34.439 --> 00:00:37.219 man who, and this isn't a metaphor, quite literally 00:00:37.219 --> 00:00:39.859 had grease under his fingernails for a significant 00:00:39.859 --> 00:00:43.659 portion of his adult life. Yeah. We are talking 00:00:43.659 --> 00:00:46.320 about Jose Saramago. The first and so far the 00:00:46.320 --> 00:00:49.070 only. Portuguese language writer to win the Nobel 00:00:49.070 --> 00:00:51.429 Prize in literature. And the journey to get there 00:00:51.429 --> 00:00:54.729 is, frankly, baffling. If you pitch this as a 00:00:54.729 --> 00:00:57.390 movie script, it just wouldn't get made. Hollywood 00:00:57.390 --> 00:00:59.170 would reject it. They'd say it's unrealistic. 00:00:59.490 --> 00:01:01.750 A landless peasant who trains as a locksmith 00:01:01.750 --> 00:01:03.929 and a mechanic, who then stops writing for nearly 00:01:03.929 --> 00:01:07.450 30 years, and then in his 60s becomes a global 00:01:07.450 --> 00:01:10.790 literary superstar. It just, it doesn't happen. 00:01:10.989 --> 00:01:13.329 It sounds like one of his own parables. And that 00:01:13.329 --> 00:01:15.549 is exactly our mission for this deep dive. We've 00:01:15.549 --> 00:01:18.390 got a stack of sources here, biographies, critical 00:01:18.390 --> 00:01:20.609 essays, his own journals. And we really need 00:01:20.609 --> 00:01:22.629 to answer one specific question. How does it 00:01:22.629 --> 00:01:25.629 happen? How does a car mechanic become the man 00:01:25.629 --> 00:01:28.790 who writes, as the Nobel Committee put it, parables 00:01:28.790 --> 00:01:31.829 sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony? 00:01:32.390 --> 00:01:36.409 How does that specific background create that 00:01:36.409 --> 00:01:39.090 very specific and, let's be honest, often difficult 00:01:39.090 --> 00:01:41.909 genius? It's a great question. I think it starts 00:01:41.909 --> 00:01:44.189 with the name itself. You really can't understand 00:01:44.189 --> 00:01:46.409 Saramago without understanding that his very 00:01:46.409 --> 00:01:49.769 identity began as a mistake. A mistake. A bureaucratic 00:01:49.769 --> 00:01:52.989 error rooted in, well, in poverty and maybe a 00:01:52.989 --> 00:01:55.590 little bit of wine. This is the wild radish story. 00:01:55.849 --> 00:01:58.010 I read this and I had to read it again because 00:01:58.010 --> 00:02:00.849 I thought I must have misunderstood. It feels 00:02:00.849 --> 00:02:03.370 almost too perfect for a writer who spent his 00:02:03.370 --> 00:02:06.909 whole life critiquing bureaucracy. So walk us 00:02:06.909 --> 00:02:09.069 through how he actually got his name. Okay, so 00:02:09.069 --> 00:02:13.069 let's set the scene. It's 1922. We're in a tiny, 00:02:13.129 --> 00:02:16.530 tiny village called Azinhaga in the Ribateo province 00:02:16.530 --> 00:02:18.550 of Portugal. And we need to be clear about what 00:02:18.550 --> 00:02:20.169 this place was like. We're not talking about 00:02:20.169 --> 00:02:22.870 a wealthy region. No, not at all. This is deeply 00:02:22.870 --> 00:02:26.370 rural, deeply poor. His father is José de Sousa. 00:02:27.110 --> 00:02:29.870 The family are landless peasants, which is, you 00:02:29.870 --> 00:02:31.729 know, the bottom of the economic ladder. Right. 00:02:32.169 --> 00:02:34.270 And in this village, like in many poor communities, 00:02:34.530 --> 00:02:37.370 families had nicknames to distinguish them from 00:02:37.370 --> 00:02:39.610 each other because there were probably a dozen 00:02:39.610 --> 00:02:41.789 other de Sousa families. And these nicknames 00:02:41.789 --> 00:02:45.030 weren't always complimentary. Almost never. They 00:02:45.030 --> 00:02:47.629 were often quite derogatory. And his father's 00:02:47.629 --> 00:02:50.849 family was known by the nickname Saramagos. Okay, 00:02:50.909 --> 00:02:53.150 and Saramago isn't just a random sound. It means 00:02:53.150 --> 00:02:55.090 something very specific in Portuguese, doesn't 00:02:55.090 --> 00:02:57.370 it? It does. It refers to the plant Rathanus 00:02:57.370 --> 00:03:00.530 raffinistrum, the wild radish. The wild radish. 00:03:00.750 --> 00:03:03.310 It's a weed. Basically, a weed that grows in 00:03:03.310 --> 00:03:06.650 the fields. And historically, in times of famine, 00:03:06.750 --> 00:03:09.050 it was gathered and eaten. It was considered 00:03:09.050 --> 00:03:12.689 poor man's food. So calling someone a Saramago. 00:03:12.889 --> 00:03:15.409 It was essentially calling them a weed. It was 00:03:15.409 --> 00:03:18.229 a slur about their poverty. It was a constant 00:03:18.229 --> 00:03:20.710 reminder that they were the people who were just 00:03:20.710 --> 00:03:22.969 barely scraping by, the ones who had to eat the 00:03:22.969 --> 00:03:25.990 weeds from the fields. Oh, wow. That gives it 00:03:25.990 --> 00:03:29.550 a real sting. Okay, so his father, Jose de Sousa, 00:03:29.629 --> 00:03:32.110 goes to the registry office to record the birth 00:03:32.110 --> 00:03:34.189 of his son. And the clerk of the registry was, 00:03:34.289 --> 00:03:37.069 by all accounts, either incredibly careless or, 00:03:37.150 --> 00:03:40.770 more likely, a bit drunk. As you do. The sources 00:03:40.770 --> 00:03:42.550 suggest he might have had a bit too much wine. 00:03:43.129 --> 00:03:45.469 Which, you know, wasn't exactly uncommon in village 00:03:45.469 --> 00:03:47.969 administration back then. So when he sat down 00:03:47.969 --> 00:03:49.930 to write the baby's name in the ledger, he didn't 00:03:49.930 --> 00:03:52.729 just write Jose de Sousa. He ad -libbed. He took 00:03:52.729 --> 00:03:54.729 it upon himself to add the insulting village 00:03:54.729 --> 00:03:57.889 nickname. He officially wrote down Jose de Sousa 00:03:57.889 --> 00:04:01.750 Saramago. And the family had no idea. None. They 00:04:01.750 --> 00:04:04.610 didn't find out for years. Not until he was seven 00:04:04.610 --> 00:04:07.349 years old and had to present his official identification 00:04:07.349 --> 00:04:10.650 papers for primary school. Oh my god, imagine 00:04:10.650 --> 00:04:13.729 that moment. Imagine the shock. You think your 00:04:13.729 --> 00:04:15.949 name is one thing your entire childhood, and 00:04:15.949 --> 00:04:18.509 then some state official tells you, no, actually, 00:04:18.629 --> 00:04:21.050 your legal surname is this insult that people 00:04:21.050 --> 00:04:23.170 in the village use behind your back. That feels 00:04:23.170 --> 00:04:25.470 like the first Saramago moment before he ever 00:04:25.470 --> 00:04:29.000 wrote a single word. It's this crisis of identity, 00:04:29.180 --> 00:04:32.079 this absurdity imposed on him by a faceless, 00:04:32.139 --> 00:04:34.920 careless bureaucrat. A drunk bureaucrat, no less. 00:04:35.060 --> 00:04:37.120 You can just see how that would plant a seed 00:04:37.120 --> 00:04:40.379 of deep skepticism about authority, about official 00:04:40.379 --> 00:04:42.459 documents, about the truth as it's written down 00:04:42.459 --> 00:04:44.800 by the state. It's almost Kafkaesque, but in 00:04:44.800 --> 00:04:47.480 this rural Portuguese setting. It is. It's the 00:04:47.480 --> 00:04:49.959 perfect origin story. But what's amazing is how 00:04:49.959 --> 00:04:52.540 he reclaimed it. He took the name of the weed, 00:04:52.720 --> 00:04:54.600 the name of the peasant food, and he made it 00:04:54.600 --> 00:04:56.740 the most prestigious name in all of Portuguese 00:04:56.740 --> 00:04:58.720 literature. He wore it like a badge of honor. 00:04:59.139 --> 00:05:02.339 Absolutely. It kept him grounded. He never, ever 00:05:02.339 --> 00:05:05.100 let people forget that he came from the earth, 00:05:05.220 --> 00:05:08.839 from those wild radish roots. It became his way 00:05:08.839 --> 00:05:11.000 of saying, I am not one of the elites. I am not 00:05:11.000 --> 00:05:14.019 from the academy. I am one of you. So let's dig 00:05:14.019 --> 00:05:15.879 into those roots a little bit more in Section 00:05:15.879 --> 00:05:18.519 1, because that poverty wasn't just, you know, 00:05:18.540 --> 00:05:21.500 a colorful backstory. It dictated the entire 00:05:21.500 --> 00:05:24.079 trajectory of his life, especially his education. 00:05:24.399 --> 00:05:26.759 It was completely deterministic. He's born in 00:05:26.759 --> 00:05:30.019 1922. The family moves to Lisbon in 1924 so his 00:05:30.019 --> 00:05:33.160 dad can get a job as a policeman. But even then. 00:05:33.740 --> 00:05:35.779 They're not living the high life. Oh, far from 00:05:35.779 --> 00:05:38.680 it. They were still struggling immensely, living 00:05:38.680 --> 00:05:41.560 in cramped quarters, just getting by. And this 00:05:41.560 --> 00:05:44.259 leads to the first major, major divergence in 00:05:44.259 --> 00:05:46.120 his life path from what you expect. He was a 00:05:46.120 --> 00:05:48.379 good student. He was a brilliant student. By 00:05:48.379 --> 00:05:50.180 all accounts, his grades were excellent. He was 00:05:50.180 --> 00:05:52.620 sharp. He was curious. In any normal timeline 00:05:52.620 --> 00:05:55.180 for a future Nobel laureate, he goes to grammar 00:05:55.180 --> 00:05:57.560 school, what they call the LISO, and then on 00:05:57.560 --> 00:05:59.259 to university. That's the path. That's the path. 00:06:00.360 --> 00:06:02.740 His parents literally could not afford the fees 00:06:02.740 --> 00:06:04.939 for the grammar school. Wow. So it was purely 00:06:04.939 --> 00:06:07.980 economic. Purely. It wasn't about talent or aptitude. 00:06:08.180 --> 00:06:11.019 It was about money. And this is that sliding 00:06:11.019 --> 00:06:14.040 doors moment. Because of a lack of funds, the 00:06:14.040 --> 00:06:16.540 door to the humanities, to a classical education, 00:06:16.879 --> 00:06:20.519 slams shut in his face. And in its place, the 00:06:20.519 --> 00:06:23.120 door to the trade school opens. Exactly. At age 00:06:23.120 --> 00:06:25.310 12, he's sent to a technical school. And the 00:06:25.310 --> 00:06:27.470 curriculum isn't Latin philosophy and literature. 00:06:27.709 --> 00:06:30.449 It's metalworking. It's mechanics. He's being 00:06:30.449 --> 00:06:33.430 trained not to think, but to do. He's being trained 00:06:33.430 --> 00:06:35.709 to be a laborer, to work with his hands. Which 00:06:35.709 --> 00:06:37.769 he does. He graduates. And for two years, he 00:06:37.769 --> 00:06:40.110 works as a car mechanic. I just, I can't get 00:06:40.110 --> 00:06:42.310 over that image. Fixing transmissions, changing 00:06:42.310 --> 00:06:45.550 oil. It's incredible. But, and this is the detail 00:06:45.550 --> 00:06:47.470 I absolutely love, the thing that shows the writer 00:06:47.470 --> 00:06:50.430 was always in there. He spends his nights haunting 00:06:50.430 --> 00:06:53.709 the public library in Lisbon. So he's got two 00:06:53.709 --> 00:06:56.949 lives. Grease -stained hands by day, ink -stained 00:06:56.949 --> 00:06:59.170 hands by night. It's a beautiful image, isn't 00:06:59.170 --> 00:07:00.490 it? He didn't have a syllabus. He didn't have 00:07:00.490 --> 00:07:02.269 a professor telling him what to read. He just 00:07:02.269 --> 00:07:05.149 had a library card and this voracious, untamed 00:07:05.149 --> 00:07:08.110 curiosity. He was autodidactic in the purest 00:07:08.110 --> 00:07:10.529 sense of the word. Just reading whatever he could 00:07:10.529 --> 00:07:13.709 get his hands on. Randomly, voraciously. And 00:07:13.709 --> 00:07:17.110 I honestly think that that lack of a formal academic 00:07:17.110 --> 00:07:20.439 training is what saved him. in a way. It's what 00:07:20.439 --> 00:07:23.079 made his style so unique. Oh, so? Because he 00:07:23.079 --> 00:07:26.319 wasn't taught how to write by a professor. He 00:07:26.319 --> 00:07:28.259 wasn't told what the rules were, so he didn't 00:07:28.259 --> 00:07:30.819 have the same fear of breaking them. He learned 00:07:30.819 --> 00:07:32.860 by absorbing the rhythm of the masters on his 00:07:32.860 --> 00:07:35.560 own terms while his day job was all about the 00:07:35.560 --> 00:07:38.519 physical, tangible world. That combination is 00:07:38.519 --> 00:07:40.680 potent. But there is a very specific emotional 00:07:40.680 --> 00:07:42.939 anchor from this time, something that feels more 00:07:42.939 --> 00:07:45.079 important than any book he could have read. We 00:07:45.079 --> 00:07:46.860 have to talk about the grandfather story. The 00:07:46.860 --> 00:07:49.480 sources all highlight this as maybe the definitive 00:07:49.480 --> 00:07:52.660 Saramago moment. It is the absolute key to his 00:07:52.660 --> 00:07:55.399 emotional landscape, to who he was as a man and 00:07:55.399 --> 00:07:57.680 as a writer. So he would spend his holidays back 00:07:57.680 --> 00:07:59.879 in the village, as in Haga, with his grandparents, 00:08:00.220 --> 00:08:02.540 Geronimo and Josefa. And these were not literary 00:08:02.540 --> 00:08:06.199 people. These were illiterate pig farmers. And 00:08:06.199 --> 00:08:08.579 when I say pig farmers, I mean they were so poor 00:08:08.579 --> 00:08:10.819 that in the winter they would bring the piglets 00:08:10.819 --> 00:08:13.899 inside and sleep with them in their own bed to 00:08:13.899 --> 00:08:15.839 keep them from freezing to death. That shows 00:08:15.839 --> 00:08:18.920 such an intense proximity between human and animal 00:08:18.920 --> 00:08:21.379 life. There's no separation there, no sense of 00:08:21.379 --> 00:08:24.139 superiority. None whatsoever. It's all just life 00:08:24.139 --> 00:08:27.959 trying to survive. But the pivotal moment comes 00:08:27.959 --> 00:08:31.779 when Geronimo, his grandfather, suffers a stroke. 00:08:32.080 --> 00:08:35.340 He's an old man and it's serious. He needs to 00:08:35.340 --> 00:08:38.659 go to Lisbon for surgery. And Geronimo, this 00:08:38.659 --> 00:08:42.340 rough, uneducated, illiterate peasant, he understands 00:08:42.340 --> 00:08:44.620 the truth of the situation with perfect clarity. 00:08:44.960 --> 00:08:47.740 He knows he's going to Lisbon to die. He's not 00:08:47.740 --> 00:08:49.700 coming back to the farm. He's facing his own 00:08:49.700 --> 00:08:51.840 mortality. So what does he do? Does he go to 00:08:51.840 --> 00:08:54.269 the church? No. He doesn't go to the church to 00:08:54.269 --> 00:08:56.250 pray. He doesn't write a will. He has nothing 00:08:56.250 --> 00:08:57.950 to leave and can't write anyway. He does something 00:08:57.950 --> 00:08:59.889 else. He goes out into the yard into a small 00:08:59.889 --> 00:09:02.250 plot of land. There are fig trees and olive trees 00:09:02.250 --> 00:09:04.830 there that he has planted and tended his entire 00:09:04.830 --> 00:09:08.250 life. And he goes to each tree one by one. He 00:09:08.250 --> 00:09:10.049 wraps his arms around their trunks. He embraces 00:09:10.049 --> 00:09:12.990 them and he cries. He is saying goodbye to the 00:09:12.990 --> 00:09:15.669 trees. That is, it's just an incredibly cinematic 00:09:15.669 --> 00:09:18.769 image, but also so deeply spiritual in a way 00:09:18.769 --> 00:09:20.570 that's completely non -religious. It's like he's 00:09:20.570 --> 00:09:22.710 thanking the earth itself for sustaining him. 00:09:22.850 --> 00:09:25.809 It's a communion. And the young Sarah Margo witnessed 00:09:25.809 --> 00:09:28.889 this. He saw it with his own eyes. And he later 00:09:28.889 --> 00:09:30.570 wrote a sentence that I think explains everything 00:09:30.570 --> 00:09:33.610 about him. He said, to see this, to live this, 00:09:33.690 --> 00:09:35.889 if that doesn't mark you for the rest of your 00:09:35.889 --> 00:09:39.110 life, you have no feeling. Wow. It wasn't just 00:09:39.110 --> 00:09:41.580 a sad goodbye for him. It was a profound lesson. 00:09:41.860 --> 00:09:45.700 It taught him where true value lies, not in abstractions, 00:09:45.700 --> 00:09:48.460 not in God or heaven, but in the tangible world. 00:09:48.620 --> 00:09:50.879 It explains so much about his later work, doesn't 00:09:50.879 --> 00:09:52.720 it? You see that theme constantly, that the most 00:09:52.720 --> 00:09:55.100 profound human experiences are physical, not 00:09:55.100 --> 00:09:56.980 abstract. They're about the earth, the body, 00:09:57.039 --> 00:09:59.980 the immediate, touchable reality. It's a kind 00:09:59.980 --> 00:10:02.480 of materialist spirituality. He didn't need a 00:10:02.480 --> 00:10:06.269 cathedral. He had the olive tree. That groundedness, 00:10:06.269 --> 00:10:08.549 that connection to the physical is what prevented 00:10:08.549 --> 00:10:11.309 his later high concept novels from just floating 00:10:11.309 --> 00:10:14.029 away into pure fantasy. Even when he's writing 00:10:14.029 --> 00:10:16.250 about impossible things, the emotions are as 00:10:16.250 --> 00:10:19.389 solid and real as that tree trunk. It gave him 00:10:19.389 --> 00:10:22.370 a kind of litmus test for truth. Does this feel 00:10:22.370 --> 00:10:24.629 as real as my grandfather hugging those trees? 00:10:24.889 --> 00:10:26.970 Speaking of his writing, we have to address what 00:10:26.970 --> 00:10:29.690 I call the great gap. Because usually a writer 00:10:29.690 --> 00:10:32.090 starts young, they struggle, they publish a few 00:10:32.090 --> 00:10:35.250 things, they slowly build a career. Saramago 00:10:35.250 --> 00:10:38.450 published his first novel, Land of Sin, in 1947. 00:10:39.070 --> 00:10:43.889 He was 24. And then... Crickets. Nothing. Silence. 00:10:43.990 --> 00:10:45.730 Absolute literary silence, at least in terms 00:10:45.730 --> 00:10:47.750 of novels, for almost 30 years. It's unheard 00:10:47.750 --> 00:10:50.019 of. Why? What happened? Did he just give up? 00:10:50.039 --> 00:10:52.059 Did he think he was a failure after that first 00:10:52.059 --> 00:10:54.580 book? It wasn't really failure so much as a moment 00:10:54.580 --> 00:10:57.039 of profound self -awareness. He famously said 00:10:57.039 --> 00:10:58.960 later, I had nothing worth saying. That takes 00:10:58.960 --> 00:11:01.779 a lot of humility. Can you imagine the self -awareness 00:11:01.779 --> 00:11:04.820 required for that? To realize that you have the 00:11:04.820 --> 00:11:08.200 technical skill to write sentences, but not yet 00:11:08.200 --> 00:11:11.100 the wisdom or the life experience to write a 00:11:11.100 --> 00:11:15.720 meaningful novel. So he stopped. And he lived. 00:11:15.799 --> 00:11:18.100 He got other jobs. He worked in the civil service. 00:11:18.139 --> 00:11:19.840 He worked in a publishing house as a production 00:11:19.840 --> 00:11:22.279 manager. He became a journalist and a translator. 00:11:22.620 --> 00:11:25.120 He lived through the Salazar dictatorship, the 00:11:25.120 --> 00:11:28.100 Estado Novo. He basically just let life fill 00:11:28.100 --> 00:11:30.399 up the reservoir. It's a great lesson for late 00:11:30.399 --> 00:11:32.639 bloomers everywhere. He didn't really have his 00:11:32.639 --> 00:11:34.919 major breakthrough until Balthazar and Blumunda 00:11:34.919 --> 00:11:38.500 in 1982. He was 60 years old. 60. Most people 00:11:38.500 --> 00:11:40.159 are starting to think about their retirement 00:11:40.159 --> 00:11:43.080 plans. Saramago was just starting his literary 00:11:43.080 --> 00:11:45.340 revolution. And because he waited, he arrived 00:11:45.340 --> 00:11:47.320 fully formed. He didn't have to experiment in 00:11:47.320 --> 00:11:50.259 public. When he returned to the novel, he brought 00:11:50.259 --> 00:11:53.080 that distinctive, difficult... mesmerizing style 00:11:53.080 --> 00:11:55.840 that he's famous for. He had spent decades listening 00:11:55.840 --> 00:11:58.080 to the way people really talk, working with official 00:11:58.080 --> 00:12:00.279 documents, seeing the absurdities of bureaucracy 00:12:00.279 --> 00:12:03.100 from the inside. All of that experience poured 00:12:03.100 --> 00:12:05.299 directly into his style. Okay, let's transition 00:12:05.299 --> 00:12:06.840 right there. Let's talk about that style. Section 00:12:06.840 --> 00:12:10.320 two, what I like to call the wall of text. Because 00:12:10.320 --> 00:12:12.419 if you're a new reader and you pick up blindness 00:12:12.419 --> 00:12:15.500 or the stone raft, the first thing you notice 00:12:15.500 --> 00:12:18.220 is that it looks, well, it looks terrifying to 00:12:18.220 --> 00:12:20.450 read. It is visually dense. There's no other 00:12:20.450 --> 00:12:22.169 way to put it. You open the page and you see 00:12:22.169 --> 00:12:26.210 these huge, solid blocks of text. Very little 00:12:26.210 --> 00:12:28.629 white space. It looks like a brick of words. 00:12:28.870 --> 00:12:32.289 And the punctuation. Or the lack of it. It's 00:12:32.289 --> 00:12:34.269 like he has a personal vendetta against quotation 00:12:34.269 --> 00:12:36.830 marks. It really does feel that way. He called 00:12:36.830 --> 00:12:40.580 his own method just enough punctuation. He essentially 00:12:40.580 --> 00:12:42.960 eliminates almost all the standard conventions 00:12:42.960 --> 00:12:45.220 of dialogue that we're used to. No quotation 00:12:45.220 --> 00:12:48.000 marks. No quotation marks. No new paragraphs 00:12:48.000 --> 00:12:50.320 when a new speaker begins. No semicolons. No 00:12:50.320 --> 00:12:53.500 em dashes to indicate a speaker. So how on earth 00:12:53.500 --> 00:12:55.620 do you know who is talking? You have to listen. 00:12:55.960 --> 00:12:58.320 You have to pay incredibly close attention to 00:12:58.320 --> 00:13:00.990 the rhythm of the language. He separates different 00:13:00.990 --> 00:13:03.850 clauses, including dialogue, with commas. The 00:13:03.850 --> 00:13:06.090 only visual cue you get that the speaker has 00:13:06.090 --> 00:13:08.870 changed is a capital letter immediately following 00:13:08.870 --> 00:13:11.649 a comma. So it would read something like, Hello, 00:13:11.889 --> 00:13:15.110 how are you? I am doing fine, thank you. Where 00:13:15.110 --> 00:13:16.769 are you going today? I am going to the market. 00:13:17.370 --> 00:13:21.850 All in one long, flowing, run -on sentence. Exactly 00:13:21.850 --> 00:13:24.250 that. And sometimes those sentences can run for 00:13:24.250 --> 00:13:26.629 pages, not just paragraphs, but entire pages. 00:13:26.909 --> 00:13:30.110 Okay, so the big question. Is this just him being 00:13:30.110 --> 00:13:33.730 difficult? Is it a kind of literary gatekeeping, 00:13:33.830 --> 00:13:36.230 a barrier to entry? Because frankly, it kept 00:13:36.230 --> 00:13:38.350 me away from his books for a long time. It definitely 00:13:38.350 --> 00:13:40.129 acts as a filter. There's no doubt about that. 00:13:40.169 --> 00:13:42.610 It demands a lot from the reader. But it's not 00:13:42.610 --> 00:13:45.409 a gimmick. It's actually an invitation. An invitation 00:13:45.409 --> 00:13:47.809 to what? An invitation to experience language 00:13:47.809 --> 00:13:50.909 differently. Yeah. Saramago himself, and most 00:13:50.909 --> 00:13:53.309 critics agree, explained that this style mimics 00:13:53.309 --> 00:13:55.730 oral storytelling. Ah, like listening to someone 00:13:55.730 --> 00:13:57.830 tell a story. Precisely. Think about when you're 00:13:57.830 --> 00:13:59.809 telling a story to a friend over dinner. You 00:13:59.809 --> 00:14:02.850 don't say open quote and close quote. You don't 00:14:02.850 --> 00:14:05.350 pause for a paragraph break. Your voice just 00:14:05.350 --> 00:14:08.250 flows. The narrator's voice seamlessly blends 00:14:08.250 --> 00:14:10.809 into the character's voices and back again. So 00:14:10.809 --> 00:14:13.370 it creates this continuous stream of consciousness. 00:14:13.970 --> 00:14:15.710 I'd call it more of a river of consciousness. 00:14:16.370 --> 00:14:19.649 And you, the reader, you have to jump into that 00:14:19.649 --> 00:14:21.649 current and just let it carry you. You can't 00:14:21.649 --> 00:14:24.509 stop and start easily. It forces a state of total 00:14:24.509 --> 00:14:26.590 immersion. You can't be distracted while reading 00:14:26.590 --> 00:14:29.769 it. You can't. And that's intentional. The critic 00:14:29.769 --> 00:14:32.129 James Wood had a great description of Saramago's 00:14:32.129 --> 00:14:34.750 narrator. He said the voice is like someone both 00:14:34.750 --> 00:14:38.289 wise and ignorant. We are figuring things out 00:14:38.289 --> 00:14:41.639 with the narrator in real time. It creates this 00:14:41.639 --> 00:14:44.059 profound intimacy. Because you have to be paid 00:14:44.059 --> 00:14:46.000 such close attention just to follow the dialogue, 00:14:46.240 --> 00:14:48.960 you become deeply, deeply invested in the characters' 00:14:49.100 --> 00:14:52.279 voices. It also has a huge effect on how we view 00:14:52.279 --> 00:14:54.259 the characters themselves, doesn't it? Especially 00:14:54.259 --> 00:14:55.820 in a book like Blindness, which we'll get to 00:14:55.820 --> 00:14:57.820 in more detail later. Yeah. He takes it a step 00:14:57.820 --> 00:14:59.980 further and stops using proper names entirely. 00:15:00.440 --> 00:15:03.440 Yes. That's another layer of his technique. In 00:15:03.440 --> 00:15:06.159 blindness, there is no John or Mary. There is 00:15:06.159 --> 00:15:08.340 the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with 00:15:08.340 --> 00:15:10.500 the dark glasses, the old man with the black 00:15:10.500 --> 00:15:13.120 eye patch, the boy with the squint. It feels 00:15:13.120 --> 00:15:15.519 like a fable or a myth. Like we've stepped out 00:15:15.519 --> 00:15:18.100 of modern specific times and into something more 00:15:18.100 --> 00:15:20.639 ancient and universal. That's precisely the point. 00:15:20.799 --> 00:15:24.120 It universalizes them. If you give a character 00:15:24.120 --> 00:15:27.019 a specific name, a specific job, a specific address, 00:15:27.240 --> 00:15:30.799 they become a specific person in a specific city. 00:15:31.400 --> 00:15:33.620 But if you call her the doctor's wife... She 00:15:33.620 --> 00:15:34.960 could be anyone. She could be your neighbor. 00:15:35.080 --> 00:15:37.039 She could be you. It strips the character down 00:15:37.039 --> 00:15:40.159 to their essential human condition. Yes. And 00:15:40.159 --> 00:15:42.940 it fits perfectly with his themes of urban alienation. 00:15:43.159 --> 00:15:45.440 That in modern life, we are often just functions 00:15:45.440 --> 00:15:48.299 bumping into each other. We are our jobs or our 00:15:48.299 --> 00:15:50.440 most physical characteristic. But by the end 00:15:50.440 --> 00:15:52.720 of the book, by forcing you to know them only 00:15:52.720 --> 00:15:55.279 by these labels, you come to care about the doctor's 00:15:55.279 --> 00:15:58.059 wife more deeply than you care about fully named 00:15:58.059 --> 00:16:00.919 characters in other books. It's a brilliant paradox. 00:16:01.440 --> 00:16:03.980 OK, so we have the peasant. roots, the long 30 00:16:03.980 --> 00:16:06.720 -year gap, and this dense, oral, challenging 00:16:06.720 --> 00:16:09.220 style. Now we need to look at what he actually 00:16:09.220 --> 00:16:11.940 wrote with that style. Section three, the major 00:16:11.940 --> 00:16:14.539 works. Because his premises are, well, they're 00:16:14.539 --> 00:16:16.500 wild. They're completely out there. They are 00:16:16.500 --> 00:16:20.059 what -if questions taken to their absolute logical 00:16:20.059 --> 00:16:23.120 extreme. He's often lumped in with the magical 00:16:23.120 --> 00:16:25.100 realism movement, you know, with writers like 00:16:25.100 --> 00:16:28.480 Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But I think Saramago 00:16:28.480 --> 00:16:30.909 is doing something quite different. He isn't 00:16:30.909 --> 00:16:32.950 really writing magic. He's writing logic puzzles. 00:16:33.210 --> 00:16:37.250 He takes one single impossible premise and then 00:16:37.250 --> 00:16:40.309 applies rigorous, almost scientific logic to 00:16:40.309 --> 00:16:42.149 it to see what happens. Let's start with the 00:16:42.149 --> 00:16:43.730 one that really broke him through internationally. 00:16:44.509 --> 00:16:47.629 Balthazar and Blamunda, published in 1982. This 00:16:47.629 --> 00:16:49.450 is the one that really put him on the map. And 00:16:49.450 --> 00:16:51.779 on the surface, it's a historical novel. but 00:16:51.779 --> 00:16:53.919 it's twisted through his unique lens. It's set 00:16:53.919 --> 00:16:56.679 in 18th century Lisbon during the height of the 00:16:56.679 --> 00:16:59.120 Inquisition. So the backdrop is incredibly dark. 00:16:59.299 --> 00:17:02.139 Very dark. You have the auto de fe, people being 00:17:02.139 --> 00:17:04.599 publicly burned at the stake for heresy. It's 00:17:04.599 --> 00:17:07.500 a brutal, oppressive world. But at its heart, 00:17:07.619 --> 00:17:10.680 the story is a romance. It's about Balthazar, 00:17:10.900 --> 00:17:13.000 a soldier who lost his left hand in the war, 00:17:13.200 --> 00:17:16.059 and Blumunda, a young woman who has a very special 00:17:16.059 --> 00:17:18.420 power. She's a clairvoyant, right? She can see 00:17:18.420 --> 00:17:21.400 things others can't. Specifically. If she hasn't 00:17:21.400 --> 00:17:24.259 eaten breakfast yet, if she's fasting, she can 00:17:24.259 --> 00:17:26.440 look at people and see their wills inside their 00:17:26.440 --> 00:17:29.880 bodies. Not their future, but their inner essence, 00:17:30.099 --> 00:17:33.200 their life force, which appears to her as a dark 00:17:33.200 --> 00:17:36.440 cloud. Wow, okay. And somehow this connects to 00:17:36.440 --> 00:17:38.099 a priest who wants to build a flying machine. 00:17:38.319 --> 00:17:40.640 That's the third part of the triangle. They get 00:17:40.640 --> 00:17:42.640 involved with a renegade priest, Bartolome de 00:17:42.640 --> 00:17:45.599 Guzman, who dreams of flight. And this is actually 00:17:45.599 --> 00:17:47.380 based on a real historical footnote. There was 00:17:47.380 --> 00:17:49.859 a priest who designed an airship called the Passarola. 00:17:50.119 --> 00:17:53.099 But Saramago takes that historical fact and asks 00:17:53.099 --> 00:17:55.579 the magical question. He asks, OK, but how does 00:17:55.579 --> 00:17:58.319 it fly? And in the book, the machine is powered 00:17:58.319 --> 00:18:01.660 by these wills that Blamunda harvests from people. 00:18:01.720 --> 00:18:04.920 It flies on human desires, this beautiful, strange, 00:18:05.160 --> 00:18:08.480 incredible mix of historical grit and metaphysical 00:18:08.480 --> 00:18:10.559 fantasy. It sounds like he's trying to rewrite 00:18:10.559 --> 00:18:12.799 history to include the people who are usually 00:18:12.799 --> 00:18:16.019 left out, the maimed soldiers, the women with 00:18:16.019 --> 00:18:18.660 strange gifts, the dreamers. That is exactly 00:18:18.660 --> 00:18:20.559 what he's doing. He's subverting the great man 00:18:20.559 --> 00:18:23.140 theory of history. The official story of that 00:18:23.140 --> 00:18:25.380 time is that the king is building the massive 00:18:25.380 --> 00:18:28.880 convent of Mafra. But Saramago ignores the king 00:18:28.880 --> 00:18:31.859 and focuses on the thousands of anonymous laborers 00:18:31.859 --> 00:18:34.720 who are hauling the stones, dying in the process. 00:18:35.220 --> 00:18:37.380 It's a very Marxist retelling of history, but 00:18:37.380 --> 00:18:39.900 done through the language of a fairy tale. OK, 00:18:39.980 --> 00:18:42.359 let's move forward a few years to the stone raft 00:18:42.359 --> 00:18:44.700 from 1986. I think this might be the funniest 00:18:44.700 --> 00:18:48.299 and also the most weirdly prophetic concept he 00:18:48.299 --> 00:18:50.099 ever came up with. It is absolutely brilliant. 00:18:50.220 --> 00:18:52.500 The premise is geological, but all of the implications 00:18:52.500 --> 00:18:55.920 are political. The book begins when a crack suddenly 00:18:55.920 --> 00:18:58.099 appears in the earth along the Pyrenees Mountains. 00:18:58.259 --> 00:19:00.500 The border between Spain and France. And the 00:19:00.500 --> 00:19:03.279 entire Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, 00:19:03.480 --> 00:19:05.740 physically breaks off from the rest of Europe. 00:19:05.819 --> 00:19:08.240 And it just, it floats away. It becomes a giant 00:19:08.240 --> 00:19:10.839 stone raft drifting aimlessly out into the Atlantic 00:19:10.839 --> 00:19:13.859 Ocean. It's basically Brexit before Brexit even 00:19:13.859 --> 00:19:16.579 existed as a concept, but it's literal. Laughs. 00:19:16.579 --> 00:19:19.940 It is. It's uncanny. But for Sarah Mago, it was 00:19:19.940 --> 00:19:22.400 all about identity. He was a lifelong proponent 00:19:22.400 --> 00:19:25.500 of something called Iberian federalism. He believed 00:19:25.500 --> 00:19:28.160 that Spain and Portugal had much more in common 00:19:28.160 --> 00:19:30.740 culturally and historically with each other and 00:19:30.740 --> 00:19:32.599 with their former colonies in South America and 00:19:32.599 --> 00:19:35.099 Africa than they did with France, Germany, and 00:19:35.099 --> 00:19:37.319 the rest of Europe. They were the periphery looking 00:19:37.319 --> 00:19:40.359 in. Exactly. So by floating the entire landmass 00:19:40.359 --> 00:19:43.359 away, he forces the characters and the reader 00:19:43.359 --> 00:19:47.359 to ask, who are we if we are not European? What 00:19:47.359 --> 00:19:50.279 is our identity if we are just us? Its geography 00:19:50.279 --> 00:19:53.059 has destiny completely rewritten. It's such a 00:19:53.059 --> 00:19:55.519 playful way to tackle a really serious political 00:19:55.519 --> 00:19:57.980 and philosophical question. Instead of writing 00:19:57.980 --> 00:20:00.859 a dry political manifesto about the EU, he writes 00:20:00.859 --> 00:20:03.680 this absurd, fantastic story about a country 00:20:03.680 --> 00:20:06.059 sailing away. And that is the Saramago method 00:20:06.059 --> 00:20:09.279 in a nutshell. Use the impossible to reveal something 00:20:09.279 --> 00:20:11.500 profoundly real. Then you have The Year of the 00:20:11.500 --> 00:20:13.859 Death of Ricardo Reis from 1984. This one feels 00:20:13.859 --> 00:20:15.700 a little more, I don't know, inside baseball 00:20:15.700 --> 00:20:17.759 for literature fans, but the central concept 00:20:17.759 --> 00:20:20.400 is just so trippy. It's a metafictional masterpiece. 00:20:21.059 --> 00:20:23.500 And to get it, you have to know a little bit 00:20:23.500 --> 00:20:26.200 about Fernando Pessoa, who was the other giant 00:20:26.200 --> 00:20:29.319 of 20th century Portuguese literature. Pessoa, 00:20:29.319 --> 00:20:31.900 who had all the alter egos. Exactly. He didn't 00:20:31.900 --> 00:20:34.079 just use pseudonyms. He created what he called 00:20:34.079 --> 00:20:37.099 heteronyms, entirely separate authorial personalities 00:20:37.099 --> 00:20:40.539 with their own biographies, writing styles, even 00:20:40.539 --> 00:20:43.180 astrological charts. One of the most famous was 00:20:43.180 --> 00:20:46.420 Ricardo Reis. And in Saramago's book, this fictional 00:20:46.420 --> 00:20:49.460 person outlives his own creator. That's the premise. 00:20:49.579 --> 00:20:52.779 The real author, Fernando Pessoa, dies in 1935. 00:20:53.220 --> 00:20:56.619 But his creation, his heteronym Ricardo Reis, 00:20:56.680 --> 00:20:59.539 somehow survives for one more year and returns 00:20:59.539 --> 00:21:02.589 to Lisbon. It becomes this incredible ghost story 00:21:02.589 --> 00:21:05.869 about literature itself. Race wanders the city, 00:21:05.970 --> 00:21:08.450 which is on the brink of fascism, and has long 00:21:08.450 --> 00:21:10.769 conversations with the ghost of Pessoa. So he's 00:21:10.769 --> 00:21:13.269 asking what's more real, the flesh and blood 00:21:13.269 --> 00:21:15.650 author who dies or the character who lives on 00:21:15.650 --> 00:21:17.609 forever in the minds of readers? Exactly. It's 00:21:17.609 --> 00:21:20.509 Saramago having this profound imaginative conversation 00:21:20.509 --> 00:21:23.109 with his literary ancestors, questioning the 00:21:23.109 --> 00:21:25.569 very nature of reality in fiction. But the big 00:21:25.569 --> 00:21:27.630 one, the one that probably got most of you listening 00:21:27.630 --> 00:21:29.849 interested in Saramago in the first place, is 00:21:29.849 --> 00:21:33.609 Blindness from 1995. And Sayo Sobere Sagira. 00:21:33.710 --> 00:21:36.289 Yes. This is the heavy hitter. This is the book 00:21:36.289 --> 00:21:38.769 that usually hooks people for life or turns them 00:21:38.769 --> 00:21:41.049 away forever. There's not much middle ground. 00:21:41.289 --> 00:21:44.529 The premise is terrifyingly simple. A mysterious 00:21:44.529 --> 00:21:47.109 plague of blindness suddenly strikes an entire 00:21:47.109 --> 00:21:50.549 city. But it's not darkness. It's white blindness. 00:21:51.289 --> 00:21:54.609 A milky sea of white, as he describes it. It's 00:21:54.609 --> 00:21:57.710 a blindness that illuminates rather than darkens, 00:21:57.710 --> 00:21:59.990 which is a terrifying idea in itself. And it 00:21:59.990 --> 00:22:02.890 spreads like a virus through sight. Right. One 00:22:02.890 --> 00:22:05.150 man goes blind in his car at a traffic light. 00:22:05.269 --> 00:22:07.349 The man who tries to help him drive home goes 00:22:07.349 --> 00:22:09.769 blind. The ophthalmologist who treats him goes 00:22:09.769 --> 00:22:12.890 blind. It's instantaneous and inexplicable. And 00:22:12.890 --> 00:22:16.460 the government, in its wisdom, panics. They round 00:22:16.460 --> 00:22:18.680 up the first victims and anyone they've had contact 00:22:18.680 --> 00:22:20.579 with, and they throw them into a disgusting, 00:22:20.799 --> 00:22:23.059 abandoned, insane asylum to quarantine them. 00:22:23.140 --> 00:22:25.440 And things go full Lord of the Flies almost immediately. 00:22:25.759 --> 00:22:29.259 It is a brutal, unflinching examination of the 00:22:29.259 --> 00:22:32.180 fragility of civilization. Saramago is asking 00:22:32.180 --> 00:22:35.380 a very simple question. How many missed meals, 00:22:35.579 --> 00:22:37.920 how many days without sight, are we away from 00:22:37.920 --> 00:22:40.539 becoming animals? And the answer is, not many. 00:22:40.720 --> 00:22:43.740 Not many at all. Inside the asylum... Society 00:22:43.740 --> 00:22:47.839 completely collapses. Gangs form, food is hoarded, 00:22:48.000 --> 00:22:50.440 women are systematically abused in exchange for 00:22:50.440 --> 00:22:54.079 food, sanitation disappears. It is visceral and 00:22:54.079 --> 00:22:56.660 disgusting. And he does not spare the reader 00:22:56.660 --> 00:22:58.960 any of the horrifying details of the filth and 00:22:58.960 --> 00:23:01.519 degradation. But there is a single point of light 00:23:01.519 --> 00:23:04.269 in all this darkness. The doctor's wife. The 00:23:04.269 --> 00:23:06.470 only person in the entire world, it seems, who 00:23:06.470 --> 00:23:08.950 keeps her sight. And she fakes being blind so 00:23:08.950 --> 00:23:10.529 she can go into the quarantine with her husband. 00:23:10.690 --> 00:23:12.930 She becomes the witness. She carries the terrible 00:23:12.930 --> 00:23:15.009 burden of seeing the horror when no one else 00:23:15.009 --> 00:23:17.089 can. It's a story about responsibility, then. 00:23:17.150 --> 00:23:19.630 If you are the one who can see, you are obligated 00:23:19.630 --> 00:23:22.410 to help those who can't. It is. It strikes that 00:23:22.410 --> 00:23:26.049 perfect Saramago balance between total pessimism 00:23:26.049 --> 00:23:29.369 about society as a whole and a deep abiding optimism 00:23:29.369 --> 00:23:31.630 about the capacity of certain individuals for 00:23:31.630 --> 00:23:45.180 love and compassion. That's the Saramago paradox 00:23:45.180 --> 00:23:48.359 right there. It is. He's a self -confessed pessimist 00:23:48.359 --> 00:23:50.359 who believed that love was the only thing that 00:23:50.359 --> 00:23:52.680 could save us. He believed that when you strip 00:23:52.680 --> 00:23:55.140 away all the institutions, the police, the government, 00:23:55.339 --> 00:23:58.140 you are left with a raw human animal. And that 00:23:58.140 --> 00:24:00.359 animal is capable of the most profound cruelty, 00:24:00.700 --> 00:24:03.380 but also the most profound tenderness. And then 00:24:03.380 --> 00:24:05.700 just to show he could, he flipped the entire 00:24:05.700 --> 00:24:08.259 script again in 2005 with death with interruptions. 00:24:08.279 --> 00:24:10.579 Instead of a plague of blindness, you get a plague 00:24:10.579 --> 00:24:13.160 of immortality. Death takes a holiday. That's 00:24:13.160 --> 00:24:15.839 the premise. In an unnamed country, on midnight 00:24:15.839 --> 00:24:18.579 of January 1st, people just stop dying. Which 00:24:18.579 --> 00:24:21.519 on the surface sounds like paradise. The ultimate 00:24:21.519 --> 00:24:24.420 human dream achieved. You would think so. But 00:24:24.420 --> 00:24:27.039 Saramago is a master of logistics. He's not interested 00:24:27.039 --> 00:24:29.119 in the philosophical idea. He's interested in 00:24:29.119 --> 00:24:31.180 the practical consequences. So what happens? 00:24:31.359 --> 00:24:34.579 Chaos. If no one dies, what happens to the hospitals? 00:24:34.839 --> 00:24:37.339 They fill up with people in permanent comas in 00:24:37.339 --> 00:24:39.920 the final stages of terminal illness just suspended. 00:24:40.180 --> 00:24:42.259 What happens to the funeral homes and the life 00:24:42.259 --> 00:24:44.680 insurance companies? They go bankrupt overnight. 00:24:45.019 --> 00:24:47.839 Families are stuck taking care of ancient, decrepit 00:24:47.839 --> 00:24:50.640 relatives who just will not pass on. And what 00:24:50.640 --> 00:24:53.299 happens to the church, to religion? That's the 00:24:53.299 --> 00:24:56.079 big one. That's his real target. The church panics. 00:24:56.259 --> 00:24:58.779 Because without death, there is no resurrection. 00:24:59.289 --> 00:25:00.829 Without resurrection, there is no Christianity. 00:25:01.089 --> 00:25:03.970 The entire philosophical and theological foundation 00:25:03.970 --> 00:25:07.849 crumbles. It's an incredibly witty and savage 00:25:07.849 --> 00:25:11.190 satire of bureaucracy, religion, and politics. 00:25:11.450 --> 00:25:13.470 And speaking of satirizing religion and politics, 00:25:13.750 --> 00:25:16.130 we cannot talk about Saramago for this long without 00:25:16.130 --> 00:25:17.849 getting into the weeds on the trouble he caused. 00:25:18.029 --> 00:25:21.009 This man was a magnet for controversy. So let's 00:25:21.009 --> 00:25:23.869 move into section four, the provocateur. He didn't 00:25:23.869 --> 00:25:26.450 just court controversy. He saw it as his civic 00:25:26.450 --> 00:25:29.130 duty. He was not a writer who was content to 00:25:29.130 --> 00:25:31.230 hide away in his study. He was out in the street, 00:25:31.349 --> 00:25:33.690 metaphorically and literally. Let's start with 00:25:33.690 --> 00:25:36.650 his politics. He wasn't a casual, you know, champagne 00:25:36.650 --> 00:25:39.309 socialist. No. He joined the Portuguese Communist 00:25:39.309 --> 00:25:43.569 Party in 1969. And we have to remember the context 00:25:43.569 --> 00:25:46.190 here. This was under the fascist Estado Novo 00:25:46.190 --> 00:25:49.299 dictatorship of Salazar. Joining the Communist 00:25:49.299 --> 00:25:51.500 Party wasn't just a political preference. It 00:25:51.500 --> 00:25:54.119 was an illegal, subversive act. It was dangerous. 00:25:54.400 --> 00:25:56.480 You could be arrested, tortured or disappeared 00:25:56.480 --> 00:25:59.579 by the PID, the secret police. And he remained 00:25:59.579 --> 00:26:01.500 a member of the party until the day he died. 00:26:01.700 --> 00:26:04.259 He described himself as a libertarian communist, 00:26:04.440 --> 00:26:07.029 which. That sounds like a contradiction in terms 00:26:07.029 --> 00:26:09.190 to a lot of people. It does. But for him, it 00:26:09.190 --> 00:26:11.569 meant a commitment to Marxist economic principles 00:26:11.569 --> 00:26:14.210 combined with a deep skepticism of the authoritarian 00:26:14.210 --> 00:26:16.589 state power, like what he saw in the Soviet Union. 00:26:16.750 --> 00:26:18.549 He was a very heterodox communist. But there 00:26:18.549 --> 00:26:21.609 was a specific incident early on in 1975 that 00:26:21.609 --> 00:26:24.170 kind of haunts his reputation. The hot summer. 00:26:24.599 --> 00:26:27.200 Right. So after the Carnation Revolution in 1974 00:26:27.200 --> 00:26:30.819 overthrew the dictatorship, Portugal was in complete 00:26:30.819 --> 00:26:33.359 political chaos. There was a real power struggle 00:26:33.359 --> 00:26:35.599 between the moderate socialists and the hardline 00:26:35.599 --> 00:26:39.559 communists. And Saramago was, at that time, the 00:26:39.559 --> 00:26:42.059 assistant director of a major newspaper, Diário 00:26:42.059 --> 00:26:45.009 de Notícias. And the paper became a mouthpiece 00:26:45.009 --> 00:26:48.069 for the hard left. It did. And in that highly 00:26:48.069 --> 00:26:51.069 charged atmosphere, there was a purge. A purge 00:26:51.069 --> 00:26:54.230 of journalists. Yes. 24 journalists at the paper 00:26:54.230 --> 00:26:57.549 who were seen as bourgeois or right wing were 00:26:57.549 --> 00:27:00.589 publicly denounced and expelled. And Saramago, 00:27:00.730 --> 00:27:02.930 as part of the leadership, was deeply implicated 00:27:02.930 --> 00:27:06.170 in that purge. He was seen by many as the enforcer 00:27:06.170 --> 00:27:08.109 of the party line. So he was actively involved 00:27:08.109 --> 00:27:10.970 in suppressing dissenting voices. That is the 00:27:10.970 --> 00:27:13.410 accusation. And it's a serious one. He later 00:27:13.410 --> 00:27:15.329 claimed he didn't order it directly, but he certainly 00:27:15.329 --> 00:27:17.029 supported the political environment that allowed 00:27:17.029 --> 00:27:18.829 it to happen. It was a revolutionary time and 00:27:18.829 --> 00:27:21.329 he was a revolutionary. But it's a black mark 00:27:21.329 --> 00:27:23.970 for many. And the irony is it backfired on him 00:27:23.970 --> 00:27:27.349 completely. Totally. When a far left coup failed 00:27:27.349 --> 00:27:31.190 in November 1975, the political pendulum swung 00:27:31.190 --> 00:27:34.730 back hard the other way. Saramago was unceremoniously 00:27:34.730 --> 00:27:37.450 fired from the newspaper. Which, bizarrely, is 00:27:37.450 --> 00:27:39.230 the only reason he became the novelist we know 00:27:39.230 --> 00:27:41.210 today. He got fired from his day job and had 00:27:41.210 --> 00:27:43.549 nothing else to do. Exactly. It's one of history's 00:27:43.549 --> 00:27:45.730 great ironies. If the Communist Revolution had 00:27:45.730 --> 00:27:48.170 actually succeeded, we might never have gotten 00:27:48.170 --> 00:27:50.190 Blindness or The Stone Raft. We would have just 00:27:50.190 --> 00:27:52.369 had Saramago, the newspaper editor. Instead, 00:27:52.470 --> 00:27:55.029 he was unemployed in his mid -50s and decided, 00:27:55.190 --> 00:27:58.069 OK, I'm finally going to dedicate myself to literature. 00:27:58.210 --> 00:28:01.369 But that political controversy, as intense as 00:28:01.369 --> 00:28:04.369 it was, really pales in comparison to the religious 00:28:04.369 --> 00:28:08.480 one. He was a militant, outspoken atheist. In 00:28:08.480 --> 00:28:11.819 1991, he dropped a cultural bomb called The Gospel, 00:28:12.039 --> 00:28:14.259 according to Jesus Christ. This was the absolute 00:28:14.259 --> 00:28:16.519 turning point of his life. In this book, he doesn't 00:28:16.519 --> 00:28:19.200 just satirize the church. He rewrites the New 00:28:19.200 --> 00:28:21.599 Testament from a humanistic perspective. And 00:28:21.599 --> 00:28:23.920 he humanizes Jesus to an extent that the Catholic 00:28:23.920 --> 00:28:26.519 Church found profoundly blasphemous. What were 00:28:26.519 --> 00:28:28.539 the specific things that triggered them so badly? 00:28:28.990 --> 00:28:31.970 Oh, where to begin? Well, for starters, in his 00:28:31.970 --> 00:28:34.890 telling, Jesus is conceived not by the Holy Spirit 00:28:34.890 --> 00:28:37.769 alone, but because Joseph has a dream and mixes 00:28:37.769 --> 00:28:40.849 his blood with the earth. Jesus later lives with 00:28:40.849 --> 00:28:43.430 Mary Magdalene as his lover. But the biggest, 00:28:43.630 --> 00:28:46.049 most unforgivable sin in the eyes of the church 00:28:46.049 --> 00:28:49.130 is the portrayal of God. God is the villain of 00:28:49.130 --> 00:28:51.809 the peace. God is depicted as a cruel, vain, 00:28:51.970 --> 00:28:54.900 manipulative power broker. There is a famous 00:28:54.900 --> 00:28:57.900 shocking scene where God and the devil are in 00:28:57.900 --> 00:29:00.099 a boat with Jesus floating in a sea of mist. 00:29:00.240 --> 00:29:03.200 And God explains his grand design to Jesus. He 00:29:03.200 --> 00:29:05.380 explains that he needs Jesus to die to found 00:29:05.380 --> 00:29:07.500 a great religion. And he needs that religion 00:29:07.500 --> 00:29:09.599 to have martyrs and inquisitions and holy wars 00:29:09.599 --> 00:29:11.880 so that his power can expand across the earth. 00:29:12.019 --> 00:29:14.180 Wow. And Jesus is horrified. He tries to back 00:29:14.180 --> 00:29:16.240 out. He tries to quit the crucifixion to refuse 00:29:16.240 --> 00:29:18.799 his role in this bloody plan. So he challenges 00:29:18.799 --> 00:29:22.150 God's morality. Yes. The book portrays the divine 00:29:22.150 --> 00:29:25.049 as capricious and cruel and the human, Jesus, 00:29:25.230 --> 00:29:27.250 as the one with true compassion. It's a total 00:29:27.250 --> 00:29:29.890 inversion of the official story. I can imagine 00:29:29.890 --> 00:29:32.069 the Catholic Church in a deeply Catholic country 00:29:32.069 --> 00:29:34.930 like Portugal was not amused. They were absolutely 00:29:34.930 --> 00:29:37.950 furious. But the real issue wasn't the church's 00:29:37.950 --> 00:29:41.299 reaction. It was the government's reaction. This 00:29:41.299 --> 00:29:44.160 leads to the infamous censorship incident of 00:29:44.160 --> 00:29:47.359 1992. Right. The book was nominated to be on 00:29:47.359 --> 00:29:49.480 the shortlist for the European Aristotelian Prize, 00:29:49.680 --> 00:29:53.160 a huge literary honor. But the conservative Portuguese 00:29:53.160 --> 00:29:56.000 government, led by Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco 00:29:56.000 --> 00:29:59.460 Silva, took an unprecedented step. They used 00:29:59.460 --> 00:30:02.200 their veto power to physically remove the book 00:30:02.200 --> 00:30:04.960 from the list of candidates. A government actively 00:30:04.960 --> 00:30:07.420 blocking its own country's most famous writer 00:30:07.420 --> 00:30:10.180 from winning a prestigious European award. Yes. 00:30:10.640 --> 00:30:12.960 Coaco Silva went on the record and said the book 00:30:12.960 --> 00:30:15.819 was religiously offensive and that it did not 00:30:15.819 --> 00:30:18.240 represent the values of Portugal. He essentially 00:30:18.240 --> 00:30:20.380 said, we are a Catholic nation and this book 00:30:20.380 --> 00:30:22.599 is an embarrassment to us. That is just stunning. 00:30:22.700 --> 00:30:24.619 It's state censorship, plain and simple, in a 00:30:24.619 --> 00:30:27.359 modern European democracy. Saramago was beyond 00:30:27.359 --> 00:30:30.099 devastated. He felt profoundly betrayed by his 00:30:30.099 --> 00:30:32.460 own homeland. He gave this heartbreaking press 00:30:32.460 --> 00:30:34.339 conference where he basically said, I have been 00:30:34.339 --> 00:30:36.700 stabbed in the back. I cannot live in a country 00:30:36.700 --> 00:30:38.880 that treats its writers this way. So he packed 00:30:38.880 --> 00:30:41.579 his bags. He went into exile. A self -imposed 00:30:41.579 --> 00:30:45.440 voluntary exile. He and his wife. Pilar del Rio, 00:30:45.599 --> 00:30:48.599 moved to the island of Lanzarote in the Canary 00:30:48.599 --> 00:30:51.660 Islands, which is Spanish territory. He lived 00:30:51.660 --> 00:30:53.500 there for the rest of his life. He never lived 00:30:53.500 --> 00:30:55.539 in Portugal again. He just walked away. That 00:30:55.539 --> 00:30:57.519 shows an incredible amount of conviction. Or 00:30:57.519 --> 00:30:59.920 stubbornness. He was a famously stubborn man. 00:31:00.519 --> 00:31:03.099 But he saw it as a fundamental principle of artistic 00:31:03.099 --> 00:31:05.700 freedom. But he didn't stop being provocative, 00:31:05.880 --> 00:31:09.420 even from his island exile. He got himself into 00:31:09.420 --> 00:31:12.200 massive trouble again in 2002, this time on the 00:31:12.200 --> 00:31:14.640 international stage, regarding Israel and Palestine. 00:31:14.940 --> 00:31:17.220 This was perhaps his most inflammatory moment 00:31:17.220 --> 00:31:20.259 of all. He visited the city of Ramallah during 00:31:20.259 --> 00:31:22.880 the height of the Second Intifada as part of 00:31:22.880 --> 00:31:25.099 a delegation of international writers. He was 00:31:25.099 --> 00:31:27.420 horrified by what he saw, the Israeli military 00:31:27.420 --> 00:31:29.799 presence, the checkpoints, the destruction. And 00:31:29.799 --> 00:31:32.210 he made a public statement. He did. And he made 00:31:32.210 --> 00:31:34.509 a comparison that you just don't make. He compared 00:31:34.509 --> 00:31:36.190 the situation in the Palestinian territories 00:31:36.190 --> 00:31:39.789 to Auschwitz. Oh, OK. That is the third rail 00:31:39.789 --> 00:31:42.109 of any political commentary. You do not make 00:31:42.109 --> 00:31:44.349 that comparison lightly. It sparked a global 00:31:44.349 --> 00:31:47.930 firestorm of outrage. Jewish organizations around 00:31:47.930 --> 00:31:50.529 the world condemned him. He gave an interview 00:31:50.529 --> 00:31:52.529 where he said the Jewish people were endlessly 00:31:52.529 --> 00:31:54.650 scratching their own wound to keep it bleeding, 00:31:54.750 --> 00:31:56.789 and they showed to the world as if it were a 00:31:56.789 --> 00:32:00.170 banner. He was widely accused of anti -Semitism. 00:32:00.650 --> 00:32:04.630 Did he ever retract it or apologize? Not really. 00:32:04.670 --> 00:32:06.849 He clarified it, but he didn't back down. Yeah. 00:32:06.930 --> 00:32:10.069 He said later that he obviously didn't mean Romulo 00:32:10.069 --> 00:32:12.170 was literally a death camp with gas chambers. 00:32:12.329 --> 00:32:15.529 He called that interpretation stupid. But he 00:32:15.529 --> 00:32:17.869 insisted that the spirit of Auschwitz, what he 00:32:17.869 --> 00:32:20.269 saw as the spirit of exclusion, of dehumanization, 00:32:20.269 --> 00:32:22.630 of collective punishment, was present there. 00:32:22.750 --> 00:32:24.529 He admitted he did it on purpose, right? He did. 00:32:24.869 --> 00:32:27.089 He said he intentionally wanted to put my finger 00:32:27.089 --> 00:32:29.500 in the Auschwitz wound. because he knew it was 00:32:29.500 --> 00:32:31.740 the only way to get a powerful reaction, to force 00:32:31.740 --> 00:32:34.599 people to look. He believed the writer's job 00:32:34.599 --> 00:32:37.559 is not to be liked, is to be a gadfly, to shake 00:32:37.559 --> 00:32:39.960 people out of their complacency. He didn't care 00:32:39.960 --> 00:32:41.980 if you called him an anti -Semite or a Stalinist. 00:32:42.019 --> 00:32:44.339 He cared if you were listening. He felt that 00:32:44.339 --> 00:32:46.539 as a citizen with a global microphone, he had 00:32:46.539 --> 00:32:48.960 a moral obligation to scream about what he saw 00:32:48.960 --> 00:32:51.460 as injustice, even if he was clumsy or offensive 00:32:51.460 --> 00:32:54.150 in how he did it. And yet... Despite all the 00:32:54.150 --> 00:32:56.930 powerful enemies he made, the church, his own 00:32:56.930 --> 00:32:59.390 government, the pro -Israel lobby, the literary 00:32:59.390 --> 00:33:02.549 world eventually had to bow down. Which brings 00:33:02.549 --> 00:33:07.549 us to section five, the Nobel Prize. 1998, the 00:33:07.549 --> 00:33:10.299 ultimate validation. Where was he when he found 00:33:10.299 --> 00:33:13.000 out the story is so perfect? It's the most mundane 00:33:13.000 --> 00:33:15.480 setting for such a life -changing event. He was 00:33:15.480 --> 00:33:17.660 at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. He wasn't 00:33:17.660 --> 00:33:19.640 even at an event. He was literally in the airport, 00:33:19.839 --> 00:33:22.339 about to board a plane to go home to Lanzarote. 00:33:22.440 --> 00:33:24.700 Just a regular traveler at an airport date. And 00:33:24.700 --> 00:33:27.460 suddenly his phone rings, and he's a Nobel laureate 00:33:27.460 --> 00:33:30.119 in literature. The committee's citation praised 00:33:30.119 --> 00:33:33.160 his parables sustained by imagination, compassion, 00:33:33.500 --> 00:33:36.099 and irony. Which is just the perfect summary 00:33:36.099 --> 00:33:39.119 of his work. But even the prize itself was controversial. 00:33:39.380 --> 00:33:41.619 It wasn't universally celebrated. The Vatican 00:33:41.619 --> 00:33:44.339 issued an official statement criticizing the 00:33:44.339 --> 00:33:47.160 award. They called it ideologically slanted. 00:33:47.240 --> 00:33:49.549 Yeah, they just couldn't let it go. Never. But 00:33:49.549 --> 00:33:51.750 Saramago's response to the Vatican is one of 00:33:51.750 --> 00:33:54.009 my favorite quotes of all time. It's classic 00:33:54.009 --> 00:33:57.130 Saramago. He just shrugged and said, the Vatican 00:33:57.130 --> 00:33:59.329 is easily scandalized. They should just focus 00:33:59.329 --> 00:34:01.750 on their prayers and leave people in peace. Focus 00:34:01.750 --> 00:34:05.069 on your prayers. It's so beautifully, brutally 00:34:05.069 --> 00:34:07.490 dismissive. It shows his confidence by that point. 00:34:07.589 --> 00:34:09.909 He had the Nobel Prize. He didn't need their 00:34:09.909 --> 00:34:11.869 approval or anyone's approval anymore. We should 00:34:11.869 --> 00:34:14.030 take a moment to talk about the person who was 00:34:14.030 --> 00:34:16.769 with him through all of this turmoil. His second 00:34:16.769 --> 00:34:20.409 wife, Pilar Gavrio. a crucial, crucial figure 00:34:20.409 --> 00:34:23.190 in his later life. She was a Spanish journalist, 00:34:23.469 --> 00:34:26.409 27 years younger than him. They met in the mid 00:34:26.409 --> 00:34:29.760 -80s and married in 1988. And she wasn't just 00:34:29.760 --> 00:34:32.280 his partner. No, she was his professional partner, 00:34:32.360 --> 00:34:34.659 too. She became his official translator into 00:34:34.659 --> 00:34:37.900 Spanish. And that was huge. That's what opened 00:34:37.900 --> 00:34:40.340 up the massive Latin American market to him and 00:34:40.340 --> 00:34:42.579 really helped make him a global phenomenon. That's 00:34:42.579 --> 00:34:44.559 such an intimate partnership. She's literally 00:34:44.559 --> 00:34:47.980 translating his thoughts, his unique voice into 00:34:47.980 --> 00:34:50.840 her own native tongue. She was fiercely intelligent 00:34:50.840 --> 00:34:53.320 and fiercely protective of him and his legacy. 00:34:53.719 --> 00:34:56.500 because he lived in exile in Lanzarote in a Spanish 00:34:56.500 --> 00:34:59.000 -speaking environment. She was really his bridge 00:34:59.000 --> 00:35:01.519 to the daily world. There's a wonderful documentary 00:35:01.519 --> 00:35:04.280 about their later years called Jose and Pilar, 00:35:04.380 --> 00:35:06.940 and you really see this dynamic. He's the grumpy, 00:35:07.079 --> 00:35:10.079 pessimistic genius, and she's this force of nature, 00:35:10.179 --> 00:35:13.000 this whirlwind of energy, managing his life and 00:35:13.000 --> 00:35:15.219 keeping the world at bay so he could write. And 00:35:15.219 --> 00:35:17.039 he kept writing right up until the very end. 00:35:17.099 --> 00:35:19.199 There's actually a fascinating story about a 00:35:19.199 --> 00:35:21.880 lost novel that really connects back to his early 00:35:21.880 --> 00:35:24.820 days of struggle. Scleroboia, which means skylight. 00:35:24.960 --> 00:35:27.340 He wrote this novel back in the 1950s during 00:35:27.340 --> 00:35:30.260 that long, silent gap. He was unknown, unpublished. 00:35:30.340 --> 00:35:32.380 And he sent the manuscript to a publisher in 00:35:32.380 --> 00:35:35.679 Lisbon. And they ghosted him. Completely. Never 00:35:35.679 --> 00:35:38.300 replied. Not a rejection letter, not a phone 00:35:38.300 --> 00:35:41.340 call, just absolute silence. He never heard a 00:35:41.340 --> 00:35:43.440 word. So what happened to it? He moved on with 00:35:43.440 --> 00:35:45.820 his life and forgot about it. Decades later, 00:35:45.920 --> 00:35:48.820 in the 1990s, when he's world famous, the publishing 00:35:48.820 --> 00:35:52.179 house is moving offices and someone finds this 00:35:52.179 --> 00:35:55.519 old dusty manuscript in a drawer. They realize 00:35:55.519 --> 00:35:58.260 what it is and they call him up all excited, 00:35:58.360 --> 00:36:00.960 basically saying, hey, we found this lost masterpiece. 00:36:01.099 --> 00:36:03.349 We'd love to publish it now. I bet they would. 00:36:03.389 --> 00:36:05.809 That's a guaranteed international bestseller 00:36:05.809 --> 00:36:08.269 right there. And Saramago said no. He turned 00:36:08.269 --> 00:36:10.389 them down. He flat out refused to publish it 00:36:10.389 --> 00:36:12.409 during his lifetime. It was a matter of dignity 00:36:12.409 --> 00:36:15.349 and principle. He basically told them, you ignored 00:36:15.349 --> 00:36:17.989 me for 40 years. I will not give you the satisfaction 00:36:17.989 --> 00:36:21.230 of profiting from me now. He stipulated that 00:36:21.230 --> 00:36:23.550 it could only be released after his death. Wow. 00:36:23.929 --> 00:36:26.849 He held a grudge for half a century. That is 00:36:26.849 --> 00:36:28.809 an impressive level of commitment. He was a man 00:36:28.809 --> 00:36:31.679 of very strong principles. Yeah. And pride. He 00:36:31.679 --> 00:36:34.820 died in 2010 at his home in Lanzarote. From leukemia. 00:36:34.940 --> 00:36:37.980 He was 87. And by all accounts, it was a very 00:36:37.980 --> 00:36:40.420 peaceful end. The story is he had breakfast, 00:36:40.599 --> 00:36:43.019 he chatted with Pilar for a while, said he felt 00:36:43.019 --> 00:36:46.460 unwell, lay down, and just slipped away. But 00:36:46.460 --> 00:36:49.579 the drama, the politics, it didn't end with his 00:36:49.579 --> 00:36:52.019 death. Which brings us to our final section, 00:36:52.219 --> 00:36:55.219 section six, the funeral. This really brings 00:36:55.219 --> 00:36:57.440 the whole political story of his life to a head. 00:36:57.619 --> 00:37:00.000 His body was flown back to Lisbon for a state 00:37:00.000 --> 00:37:03.519 funeral. And it was a massive public event. The 00:37:03.519 --> 00:37:06.079 reports say 20 ,000 people lined the streets 00:37:06.079 --> 00:37:08.639 to pay their respects. But guess who didn't show 00:37:08.639 --> 00:37:11.679 up? It has to be Anibal Cabaco Silva. The very 00:37:11.679 --> 00:37:13.920 same man. The prime minister who censored his 00:37:13.920 --> 00:37:16.219 book back in 1992 was now the president of the 00:37:16.219 --> 00:37:18.719 Republic of Portugal. And he refused to attend 00:37:18.719 --> 00:37:21.199 the funeral of his country's only Nobel laureate. 00:37:21.260 --> 00:37:23.599 That is an incredible level of pettiness. He 00:37:23.599 --> 00:37:25.239 released a statement saying he never had the 00:37:25.239 --> 00:37:27.500 privilege to know him. the only Nobel winner 00:37:27.500 --> 00:37:29.800 in your country's entire history, and you skip 00:37:29.800 --> 00:37:31.780 the funeral because of a 20 -year -old beef over 00:37:31.780 --> 00:37:34.139 a book. And the people on the streets noticed. 00:37:34.579 --> 00:37:37.519 The mourners were holding red carnations, the 00:37:37.519 --> 00:37:40.739 symbol of the 1974 revolution, the symbol of 00:37:40.739 --> 00:37:43.900 the communism that Saramago championed. And they 00:37:43.900 --> 00:37:46.280 were shouting at the official motorcades, asking 00:37:46.280 --> 00:37:49.250 where the president was. It turned the funeral 00:37:49.250 --> 00:37:52.630 into one final political protest. So even in 00:37:52.630 --> 00:37:55.130 death, he was this figure dividing the establishment 00:37:55.130 --> 00:37:57.789 from the people. Exactly. Yeah. But the burial 00:37:57.789 --> 00:38:00.969 itself, that's the part that brings us full circle. 00:38:01.070 --> 00:38:03.429 Yeah. Right back to Section 1 and his grandfather. 00:38:03.789 --> 00:38:06.710 The olive tree. They buried his ashes in Lisbon 00:38:06.710 --> 00:38:09.309 in the square in front of the Saramago Foundation 00:38:09.309 --> 00:38:12.110 headquarters. But they didn't just put a tombstone 00:38:12.110 --> 00:38:14.250 there. They went back to his home village of 00:38:14.250 --> 00:38:17.280 Azinhaga. No way. Yes. They dug up a hundred 00:38:17.280 --> 00:38:19.619 -year -old olive tree, transported it all the 00:38:19.619 --> 00:38:21.760 way to Lisbon, and planted it directly over his 00:38:21.760 --> 00:38:23.719 ashes. The same kind of tree his grandfather 00:38:23.719 --> 00:38:26.500 embraced. The very same. So he rests in the heart 00:38:26.500 --> 00:38:28.539 of the capital city, but he is under the roots 00:38:28.539 --> 00:38:31.440 of his peasant history. He has literally returned 00:38:31.440 --> 00:38:33.639 to the earth he came from. That's pure poetry. 00:38:33.920 --> 00:38:36.619 It's the perfect ending. It honors the little 00:38:36.619 --> 00:38:39.039 boy who watched his grandfather say goodbye to 00:38:39.039 --> 00:38:41.639 the world by hugging a tree. It seals the entire 00:38:41.639 --> 00:38:44.860 narrative. The wild radish returned to the earth. 00:38:45.260 --> 00:38:47.800 So after all this, what is the final takeaway 00:38:47.800 --> 00:38:50.059 here? We've looked at the mechanic, the communist, 00:38:50.340 --> 00:38:53.019 the atheist, the Nobel winner. Who was this man? 00:38:53.219 --> 00:38:55.280 I think the takeaway is all about the idea of 00:38:55.280 --> 00:38:58.659 sight. Saramago once said, I think we are blind, 00:38:58.820 --> 00:39:02.260 blind people who can see but do not see. And 00:39:02.260 --> 00:39:04.480 his entire life's work was an attempt to make 00:39:04.480 --> 00:39:06.909 us see. He stripped away the grammar to make 00:39:06.909 --> 00:39:09.110 us really see the words. He stripped away the 00:39:09.110 --> 00:39:10.869 proper names to make us see the people underneath. 00:39:11.190 --> 00:39:13.469 He stripped away the comforting myths of religion 00:39:13.469 --> 00:39:16.210 to make us see our own raw humanity. Exactly. 00:39:16.369 --> 00:39:19.190 He challenges us. He forces us to look at what 00:39:19.190 --> 00:39:22.110 he called the illusory reality, to stop accepting 00:39:22.110 --> 00:39:23.969 the official story, whether that story comes 00:39:23.969 --> 00:39:26.630 from the church or the state or even the basic 00:39:26.630 --> 00:39:28.869 syntax of our own language, and to look at the 00:39:28.869 --> 00:39:32.190 raw, messy, complicated, often ugly human truth 00:39:32.190 --> 00:39:34.599 that's hiding underneath. He was a pessimist 00:39:34.599 --> 00:39:37.420 who gave us the tools to understand our own darkness. 00:39:37.760 --> 00:39:40.920 And in doing so, he offered a very strange and 00:39:40.920 --> 00:39:43.579 difficult kind of hope. Because if we can truly 00:39:43.579 --> 00:39:46.099 see the darkness, if we can look at it without 00:39:46.099 --> 00:39:48.800 flinching, then maybe we have a chance to navigate 00:39:48.800 --> 00:39:51.079 it. So for you listening, the challenge is pretty 00:39:51.079 --> 00:39:54.900 simple. Pick up one of his books, but be warned, 00:39:55.079 --> 00:39:58.039 it requires your full attention. Which one would 00:39:58.039 --> 00:40:00.380 you say they should start with? I think if you 00:40:00.380 --> 00:40:03.880 want the romance and the history. and the magic, 00:40:04.139 --> 00:40:07.739 you start with Balthazar and Blumunda. If you 00:40:07.739 --> 00:40:10.480 want the terrifying sociopolitical thriller that 00:40:10.480 --> 00:40:12.900 will keep you up at night, it has to be Blindus. 00:40:13.539 --> 00:40:15.500 And if you want to laugh at the absurdity of 00:40:15.500 --> 00:40:18.099 bureaucracy, you pick up Death with Interruptions. 00:40:18.239 --> 00:40:20.280 Or if you just want to see a whole country fall 00:40:20.280 --> 00:40:22.340 apart and float away, which feels pretty relevant 00:40:22.340 --> 00:40:25.000 these days, you go for The Stone Raft. Just don't 00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:27.320 let that first page of dense text scare you off. 00:40:27.400 --> 00:40:29.679 No. Once you find the rhythm, once you let yourself 00:40:29.679 --> 00:40:31.500 fall into that river of his voice, you won't 00:40:31.500 --> 00:40:34.119 want to stop. So go find an old olive tree, sit 00:40:34.119 --> 00:40:36.639 down, and start reading. Thanks for diving deep 00:40:36.639 --> 00:40:38.239 with us. It was a pleasure. We'll see you on 00:40:38.239 --> 00:40:38.619 the next one.