O grande aprendiz: José Saramago vit pour dire qu'il est

Abstract

When, in 1975, José Saramago (1922-2010) lost his job at Diário de Notícias and felt forced to take the “big decision” of his life: to become a writer, he was almost sixty years, and certainly had not imagined that he would become one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. By nurturing, in a particular way, the artistic and cultural genres and trends, he found out, revisited his literary career and showed us the movements of development of his work, which comprises since the first publication – Terra do pecado (1947) - until the last, still alive - Caim (2009) - more than sixty years of production. In a moment of extreme sincerity, 6 May 1994, he wrote in his diary, Cadernos de Lanzarote (1997), “on vit pour dire chi on est” – “we live to tell who we are”. This need to say who he is led him to affirm, constantly, that in his literature, the marks of his life are printed; and that the reader, by entering into the fictional universe of the writer, do not look up to read the novel, but the novelist. This short essay aims to reflect on his work and dialogue about what there is of Saramago himself, in it, highlighting the fictional and personal “passages”, decisive of this trajectory.