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His outspokenness set off a storm of protest in 2002 when during a visit he compared Ramallah, a Palestinian city blockaded at the time by the Israeli army, to the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Holocaust survivors and intellectuals, including left-wing doves who were highly critical of the Israeli government's policy toward the Palestinians, condemned Saramago's statement as false and anti-Semitic. In 1998 he said his book "Blindness" was about "a blindness of rationality." In that book, which was made into a 2008 movie starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, the population of an unnamed city is struck by a mysterious blindness which is never explained. Society's fragilities come to the fore as a general breakdown of infrastructures ensues. "We're rational beings but we don't behave rationally. If we did, there'd be no starvation in the world," he said. Such compassion and anxiety about the skewing of priorities in modern society is evident in all his works and also gives a clue to his enduring sympathy toward the Communist Party. He was frequently compared with Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his writing is often described as realism tinged with Latin-American mysticism, particularly for his technique of confronting historical personages with fictional characters. Portuguese critic Torcato Sepulveda said Saramago successfully "sought to reconcile the rationalism of his materialistic world view with the richness of his baroque style." Others disagreed, saying Saramago was too intellectual and that his storytelling pace often slowed to a dreary plod, or that his sparing use of punctuation and speech marks confused the reader. Saramago had a remedy: "I tell them to read my books out loud and then they'll pick up the rhythm, because this is
'written orality.' It is the written version of the way people tell stories to each other," he said. Historical and literary mischief were Saramago's trademarks. In "The History of the Siege of Lisbon," from 1989, a Lisbon proofreader mischievously inserts the word "not" into a text on the 12th century capture of the Portuguese capital from the Moors, thereby fictionally altering the course of European history with a stroke of his pen. In his 1986 book, "The Stone Raft," the Iberian peninsula snaps off from the rest of the European continent and floats off into the North Atlantic
-- apparently in a metaphorical search for identity away from the standardizing nature of the EU. He left a wife, Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio, and a daughter from his first marriage.
[Associated
Press;
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