Why are some people mad at Portugal nobelist Saramago?”
One evening in June, the Portuguese novelist José Saramago was addressing a small gathering at a book party in Lisbon. The occasion was the reissue of a volume of his poems originally published in 1975. Saramago, who is 84, is an austere man, extremely tall and so lean that he is practically concave. The night was hot, but he was wearing, as usual, a dark suit and tie. An outspoken atheist, Saramago maintains that religion is to blame for most of the world’s violence. Yet in his old age he resembles nothing so much as a steely churchman from a Renaissance altarpiece, a St. Jerome in the desert. Skip to next paragraph Jillian Edelstein The long road to literary fame: Saramago at his Canary Islands “exile.” Saramago first won fame in the English-speaking world two decades ago with the publication of his novel “Baltasar and Blimunda,” a picaresque love story set during the Portuguese Inquisition and written in a fantastical vein that drew him comparisons with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His s
