Portuguese writer José Saramago
Saramago is the first and only Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 3.5 million copies, including the Chinese version of The Monastery Chronicle and Blindness.
Saramago was born in a small village in the north of Lisbon on 1922. Due to economic reasons, he was forced to give up his studies when he was still in high school and moved to various service industries. His last physical job was as a salesman of electric welding machines. 1947, his first novel, The Land of Sin, was published, making Saramago an editor of a literary magazine. What really made Saramago a great success was the publication of 1982 Chronicle of Monastery. This is a rich and polysemous text, which contains various views on history, society and individuals. The best representatives of Saramago's creative style are History of Besieged Lisbon and Blindness, which won him 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature. The constant attack on the autocratic system makes many of Saramago's novels read more like political fables.
His atheism and strong left-wing political tendency also make him unpopular with the mainstream western media. Commentator Ian Bluma once called Saramago "Zola of our time" ironically, meaning that Saramago inherited the tradition of writer intervention initiated by Zola.
From the writing style, the sentences and paragraphs in the history of "The Besieged Lisbon" are like an endless rolling background, which makes the past and present, novels and history wash back and forth on the paper. Blindness, like a lost and confused fable, tells the ugliest desire and hopeless fragility of human beings.
Saramago's ability to control history has been fully demonstrated in the history of the besieged city of Lisbon. In the book, Raimondeau Silva, an old bachelor and proofreader in his fifties, easily rewrote the ancient history that Alfonso I, the first Portuguese king, asked the Crusaders for help to drive away the Moors in 1 147. Silva's audacity shocked his colleagues, and his boss, Maria Sara, who is 15 years younger than him, also took a keen interest in him. She urged the disruptive proofreader to tell the history of Lisbon with her own characteristics in a mischievous way. With the gradual formation of his revision history, his relationship with Sarah is also changing.
This is Saramago's unique style-sentences and paragraphs are like an endless rolling background, allowing the past and present, novels and history to wash back and forth on the paper.
Obviously, Saramago is concerned about the rewriteability of history and the surprising relationship between fiction and fiction.
Saramago paid equal attention to rationality and individual survival. Blind published by 1995, like a lost fable, tells the ugliest desire and hopeless fragility of human beings.
A driver suddenly went blind and couldn't move at a busy intersection. A "wrong" kind man drove him home, but he became the second victim. The ophthalmologist arrived at the news and became the third ... The disease spread and the city fell into chaos. As a result, the authorities ordered all blind people to be driven into an abandoned mental hospital, guarded by armed soldiers, and began filming. At this time, evil factors germinated among the surviving blind people, food rations were stolen and women were raped. Everything fell into the eyes of a woman who pretended to be blind in order to take care of her blind husband, the dentist. She led seven strangers to walk in the empty streets of the city. The outcome of this strange anonymous group-the congenital blind, the old man wearing a black blindfold, the girl wearing black glasses, the boy who lost his loved ones and the crying dog-is as bizarre and sad as the riots around him. ...
Regarding this masterpiece that helped him to wear the laurel, Saramago said: "Blindness is not true blindness, but blindness to reason. We are all rational people, but there is no rational behavior. If we do, there will be no hunger in the world. " Blindness has been praised by many parties in the western world. The publisher said, "Blindness is the most challenging, thought-provoking and exciting novel in all languages published in recent years."
Kunius said, "This reminds people of the plague in albert camus ... In this environment where philosophy and metaphor blend, only the most basic needs of human beings are eternal." The New York Times Book Review holds that "... neither cynical nor opinionated, but ... the quality of being honestly named after wisdom. We should thank it for presenting such a vast world to readers. " Cox compares it with Orwell's 1984, Kafka's The Trial and Camus's The Plague.