Portuguese · b. 1922
José Saramago was a Portuguese novelist whose allegorical fiction, written in long unbroken paragraphs with minimal punctuation, used the fantastical to expose the fragility of civilization.
Born into poverty in rural Alentejo in 1922, Saramago worked as a locksmith, a civil servant, a translator, and a journalist before his fiction found an international audience — he was in his sixties before he became famous, and the novels that made his reputation were written entirely in the second half of his life. He won the Nobel Prize in 1998, the first Portuguese-language writer to do so. He died in 2010 at his home in the Canary Islands, where he had lived since 1992 after leaving Portugal in protest at his government’s objection to one of his novels.
His distinctive prose style is immediately recognisable: sentences that continue across entire pages, dialogue embedded in the running text with no quotation marks, speakers distinguished only by a capital letter after a comma, paragraphs that refuse to end. The style is not merely eccentric — it enacts his novels’ themes, the difficulty of knowing where one thought ends and another begins, the instability of individual identity within the collective. Blindness (1995), his most famous novel, imagines a city suddenly struck by an epidemic of white blindness and follows the collapse of civil order that follows, with the doctor’s wife — inexplicably spared — serving as a moral witness. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), which imagined Christ as an unwitting victim of God’s ambition, was so controversial that the Portuguese government vetoed it for a European literary prize, prompting his self-imposed exile.
Baltasar and Blimunda, The Stone Raft, The Cave, and The Double are among his other major works. Each takes an impossible premise and drives it to its logical conclusion with total seriousness, using the fantastical to illuminate exactly what the realistic novel would prefer to look away from.
by José Saramago
An unexplained epidemic of blindness sweeps through an unnamed city, and those afflicted are quarantined in a former asylum under military guard. One woman—the doctor's wife—alone can see, and she guides a small group through the collapse of all social order in a world suddenly without sight.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by José Saramago
Portugal, 1711. A soldier with a missing hand and a woman who can see inside human bodies fall in love against the backdrop of the Inquisition, the building of the great Mafra Convent by King João V, and a mad priest's plan to build a flying machine powered by human wills. Saramago's most romantic novel.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by José Saramago
Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, and his son-in-law discover that the vast commercial Center that dominates their world no longer wants pottery—it wants plastic replicas. As Cipriano's craft becomes obsolete, the family moves to live inside the Center, where beneath the shopping mall they discover something that rewrites everything they thought they knew about the world they inhabit.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by José Saramago
Saramago retells the Gospels from a resolutely human perspective: Jesus is the son of a carpenter who carries guilt for being complicit in the Massacre of the Innocents, is seduced by Mary Magdalene, and discovers that God intends to use him not to redeem humanity but to expand his own power and territorial reach. A novel so controversial it was pulled from consideration for a Portuguese literary prize under government pressure.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by José Saramago
In a small unnamed country, death simply stops. No one dies. The immediate consequences—the chaos for funeral homes, hospitals, insurance companies, and the Church—are comedic and precise. Then death resumes, but only announces her arrivals by violet letter seven days in advance. In the second half, death falls in love with a cellist who refuses to die.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by José Saramago
The Pyrenees crack and the entire Iberian peninsula breaks off from Europe, drifting into the Atlantic. Five Portuguese and Spanish strangers—who each experienced a mysterious personal event just before the detachment—are drawn together as the peninsula sails toward an unknown destination. Saramago's most playful and politically charged novel.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Disclosure: Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.