Perguntam-me não raras vezes:
- "Qual o livro de José Saramago que mais gostaste de ler?"
A resposta que pode ser dada a cada momento:
- "Impossível de dizer... não sei responder, não seria justo para com outros (livros) não nomeados. Mas uma coisa sempre soube. Uma obra de Saramago, enquanto "pseudo ser vivo" ou com "gente dentro" tem que me raptar, prender-me, não me deixar sair de dentro das suas páginas. Fazer de mim um refém, e só me libertar no final da leitura... mesmo ao chegar à última página. Aí, o "Eu" leitor que se mantém refém, liberta-se da "gente que a obra transporta dentro" e segue o seu caminho.
Mas segue um caminho que se faz caminhando, conjuntamente com mais uma família"

Rui Santos

quinta-feira, 6 de novembro de 2014

Portugal de 75 "À espera de Godot?" de Beckett - A analogia com a politica nacional

O momento político nacional, nos tempos do verão quente de 1975.
Os que fazem e concretizam o espírito da revolução, e os seus momentos de pausa e recuos.

Os Apontamentos
Caminho - 2.ª edição / 1990

À espera de Godot? - 17 de Junho de 1975



Godot, quem é? Na peça de Beckett, todo o tempo se passava na espera e na esperança dessa entidade invisível que resolveria todos os problemas, quando chegasse. Quando chegasse, e se chegasse... Quem conhece a peça, sabe que nenhuma diferença há entre o princípio dela e o fim, que a mesma árvore seca cobre ou agride o mesmo esperar e o mesmo desespero. Continuaremos a literatizar? Um pouco mais, apenas, para satisfazer o gosto... Aqueles personagens discutem, ferem-no, alternam o ódio e reconciliação, tudo de acordo com a chamada natureza humana, para Beckett idêntica e transmissível de todos os tempos para todos os tempos: tudo se resumiria a um eterno esperar, a um projecto contínuo, só projecto, sem começo sequer de realização, porque sem Godot nada se pode fazer e Godot não vem...
E nós, em Portugal? Godot chegou a 25 de Abril, e tornou outras vezes: Junho, Setembro, Março recente, não por predestinação ou favor especial dos deuses, mas porque aqui nos esforçámos todos os que querem a Revolução e a estão fazendo. Este Godot de carne, osso e vontade não precisa das artes da dramaturgia,  mas depende da vitalidade de um processo que muitas mãos empurram (bem ou mal) e outras procuram travar. (...)
(...) E aqui voltaríamos à peça de Beckett: pela primeira vez, em momento de crise, se passam tão poucas coisas à luz do dia e às claras, e tantas tão secretas, nos bastidores. É como se o Poder (onde esteja) desconfiasse do peso das massas populares e da sua distribuição, e, desconfiando, prefira deliberar, apresentar e praticar sozinho. (...)

Referência na Wikipédia em http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperando_Godot

En attendant Godot ou Waiting for Godot, em inglês (À Espera de Godot em Portugal; Esperando Godot no Brasil) foi a primeira peça de teatro escrita pelo dramaturgo Irlandês Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). Escrita originalmente em francês, foi publicada pela primeira vez em 1952 e apresentada no pequeno Théâtre Babylone em Paris, com direção de Roger Blin (1907-1984). O Brasil foi o segundo país a ter uma montagem deste texto, com a direção de Alfredo Mesquita, em 1955. É considerado um das principais textos do teatro do absurdo e a principal obra de Samuel Beckett.
A Criação - Beckett escreveu a peça em 1949 e só veio a publicá-la no ano de 1952, em francês. Em 1955 Beckett realizou sua versão inglesa. Personagens da peça:
Vladimir
Estragon
Pozzo
Lucky
Um garoto
A peça é dividida em dois atos. Nos dois atos, inicialmente contracenam dois personagens: Vladimir (Didi) e Estragon (Gogo). Durante cada um dos atos, que são bem semelhantes, surgem dois novos personagens: Pozzo e Lucky. Além destes, entra em cena no final de cada ato um garoto.
O Enredo - A rubrica inicial define: Estrada, árvore, à noite (Route à la campagne, avec arbre. Soir). Em cena Estragon e Vladimir. Aparentemente esperam um sujeito de nome Godot. Nada é esclarecido a respeito de quem é Godot ou o que eles desejam dele. Os dois iniciam longo diálogo, só interrompido quando da entrada de Pozzo e Lucky. Lucky carrega uma pesada mala que não larga um só instante. O segundo ato desenvolve a mesma dinâmica. O cenário é o mesmo, apenas a árvore está um pouco diferente, agora com algumas folhas. Estragon e Vladimir iniciam sua jornada na espera de Godot. Surgem novamente Pozzo e Lucky. Pozzo está cego e Lucky surdo. Após a partida destes, aparece novamente um garoto anunciando novamente que Godot não virá, talvez amanhã. O diálogo final, que encerra o ato e a peça é o seguinte:
Vladimir: Então, devemos partir? (Alors, on y va?) (Well, shall we go?)
Estragon: Sim, vamos. (allons-y.) (Yes, let's go.)
Eles não se movem. (Ils ne bougent pas.) (They do not move.)

José Saramago "The Unexpected Fantasist" Fernanda Eberstadt - The New York Times - 26/08/2007

Aqui o perfil de Saramago segundo o The New York Times

Aqui o link da entrevista




The Unexpected Fantasist
By Fernanda Eberstadt
Published: August 26, 2007

One evening in June, the Portuguese novelist Jos?aramago 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.

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 subsequent novels earned him a reputation for profound versatility. In his 1995 political parable, ''Blindness,'' a city is reduced to savagery by a mysterious plague of sightlessness. The Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, who directed ''City of God'' and ''The Constant Gardener,'' is currently making a film of the book.

For many years, Saramago was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but there were other Portuguese-language writers, like the Brazilian Jorge Amado, who seemed likelier bets. In October 1998, Saramago was preparing to fly out of Germany after the Frankfurt Book Fair when he was told not to board the plane, because he had just won the prize. He was a little stunned.

''He returned to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which was like Grand Central Station at rush hour,'' recalls Christopher MacLehose, the legendary former publisher of Harvill Press in England who helped introduce Saramago's novels to English-language readers. ''The place went mad.''

Zeferino Coelho, Saramago's Portuguese editor, remembers Saramago's subdued reaction: ''When he won the Nobel, Saramago said to me, 'I was not born for all this glory.' I told him, 'You may not have been made for this glory, but I was!' ''

It's not much of a stretch to say that Saramago has since regarded his literary fame chiefly as a means of spreading his political convictions. A member since 1969 of Portugal's notoriously hard-line Communist Party, Saramago spends much of his time at international forums, where he tends to deliver rather dull, pedantic speeches denouncing the European Union or the International Monetary Fund. Five years ago, however, he managed to create a worldwide scandal when, on a tour of the West Bank, he compared the situation in the Palestinian territories with ''Auschwitz.''

To the literary critic Harold Bloom, the comparison with Auschwitz was ''an unforgivable failure of imagination and humanity'' on the part of a novelist he considers ''second only to Philip Roth'' among living writers. ''Saramago's novels are endlessly inventive, endlessly good-natured, endlessly skillful,'' Bloom told me, ''but it baffles me why the man can't grow up politically. In 2007, to be a Portuguese Stalinist means you're simply not living in the real world.''

At the book party in Lisbon, Saramago was in a more lyrical mood. His unscripted half-hour speech ranged widely in subject matter, from his own ''blackness'' of feeling when the leftist Portuguese Revolution of 1974 took a social-democratic turn, to how neorealism in 20th-century painting was unjustly eclipsed by Surrealism, to the staircase Michelangelo designed for the Laurentian Library in one cloister of San Lorenzo in Florence. ''When I first saw this work, 30 years ago,'' he said, ''I trembled.''

Saramago concluded his talk: ''Every man has his own patch of earth to cultivate. What's important is that he dig deep.''

To one side of the lectern where Saramago spoke, a lushly beautiful dark-haired woman stood in a white suit. This was his wife, Pilar del Rio. From time to time, del Rio, struggling to catch her husband's eye, raised her hand to her mouth, indicating in insistent pantomime that he should drink from the bottle of water at his side. To me, she rolled her eyes at the absurdity of an old man too stubborn to hydrate himself on a hot summer night. Saramago seemed quite pleased to gaze at del Rio, but he wouldn't drink.

Saramago has a mixed reputation in his native land. When he won the Nobel Prize, Portuguese readers evidently felt vindicated that one of their countrymen had at last received this high honor. Coelho, his editor, told me that from October to November 1998, ''we printed 400,000 copies of his latest book. Overall, we have sold 2 million copies of Saramago's works -- this, in a country of 10 million people, is a lot.''

Yet Saramago also often appears to be disliked. In part this is the resentment of a country that has long been dominated by a small elite. In part, it is a matter of Saramago's own unaccommodating personality. Everywhere I went in Lisbon in June, people described him as ''cold,'' ''arrogant,'' ''unsympathetic.'' When my interpreter inquired at a DVD store if a documentary about Saramago was in stock, the young salesman, startled by the request, replied, laughing, ''I hope not!''

Abroad, even Saramago's champions concede that he is a somewhat prickly character. ''Jos?aramago is one of the most graceful men I've ever met,'' MacLehose told me, ''but he is pretty obdurate. He arrived at international recognition relatively late in life, after having long been a substantial thorn in the side of the Portuguese government, and he is very much his own man.''

Saramago himself appears undismayed by his reputation. ''I am not a bad person,'' he said at the book party. ''I hurt only with my tongue!''

the following day, I went to visit Saramago at his home in Lisbon. His permanent residence is in the Spanish Canary Islands, where he has been living in symbolic exile since 1992, when the Portuguese government, apparently under pressure from the Catholic Church, blocked his supposedly heretical novel, ''The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,'' from being nominated for a European literary prize.

He nonetheless keeps a pied-?erre in a modern middle-class neighborhood of Lisbon. Inside, the house, shuttered dark against the encroaching sunlight, is as impersonal as a hotel suite. Virtually the only books on the living-room shelves are those by the author himself. (His compound in the Canary Islands, by contrast, has a university-size library, which he makes available to students.)

Pilar del Rio served coffee in demitasses. Del Rio is an elegant, voluble journalist from Seville. She is Saramago's second wife -- they married in 1988 -- and is nearly 30 years younger than he. They met in the mid-'80s, when she was lecturing in Lisbon, she told me. Their marriage appears to be warmly symbiotic. Del Rio answers her husband's correspondence under the e-mail alias of ''Blimunda'' and serves as his Spanish-language translator.

Eventually Saramago descended from an upstairs study and, upright as a soldier, took his place in an armchair. We talked for four hours. I asked questions, my interpreter translated, Saramago answered. Most of his replies began, ''No, that is not true ... ,'' and briskly devolved into lectures on working conditions in China, or how the late Soviet Union was in fact a capitalist economy ''in disguise.'' His tone was dry, professorial: it seemed as if he could continue for another day or two without breaking a sweat or cracking a smile.

¶ The unyielding coolness is, admittedly, hard-won. There are few literary stars who have risen from as impoverished a background. Born in 1922, Saramago grew up in a small village about 60 miles northeast of Lisbon. His maternal grandparents were landless peasants who raised pigs, and Saramago's early years were spent hoeing, chopping wood and hauling water from the pump. In his Nobel lecture, Saramago described his grandfather Jerä(3$)nimo as ''the wisest man I ever knew.'' On summer nights when Saramago was a child, he recalled, his grandfather would take him to sleep outside under a fig tree and regale him with ''legends, apparitions, terrors.'' It was ''an untiring rumor of memories'' that later fueled his own literary imagination. ''If my grandfather had been a rich landowner and not an illiterate pig breeder, I wouldn't be the man I am today,'' Saramago told me. ''If I could choose my own background -- even with the cold of the winters, the heat of the summers, sometimes going hungry -- I wouldn't change a thing.''

When Saramago was 2, his parents, searching for work, moved the family to Lisbon. For the young Jos?the transplant didn't take. In ''As Pequenas Memä(3$)rias,'' his childhood memoirs, which were recently published in Portugal, he portrays his native village, to which he returned from Lisbon for long stretches every year, as ''the pouch into which this small marsupial -- quiet, secret, solitary -- retreated in order to create himself.''

The mark that the old village made on Saramago extended to his name itself. ''When I showed up, aged 7, for my first day of school in Lisbon, I had to present my identity papers,'' he told me. It was only then his parents discovered that the last name printed on his birth certificate was not their family name, de Sousa. The village clerk had instead registered the baby as ''Saramago,'' or ''wild radish.''

''It was an insulting nickname villagers gave my father,'' Saramago explained. ''The clerk wrote it perhaps because he was drunk, perhaps as a prank. My father wasn't very happy, but if that was his son's official name, well, then, he had to take it, too. I think never before in history has a son named his father.''

From his peasant roots, Saramago acknowledged, he has derived a certain fatalistic pragmatism. The narrative sensibility that runs through his fiction was described by the critic Irving Howe as ''caustic and shrewd.'' In one book, a character whose viewpoint the reader suspects lies close to the author's says, ''Unless I can see things with these eyes of mine that the earth will one day devour, I don't believe in them.''

Yet coexisting with this flinty skepticism is a taste for the fantastical. The joke implicit in Saramago's fiction is that he has placed his sober, mistrustful protagonists in a world of magic, where countries detach themselves from the mainland and float out to sea, cities are struck by epidemics of blindness and an 18th-century renegade priest escapes the Inquisition in a flying machine whose means of locomotion is the human will.

This folk-tale sensibility is what differentiates Saramago's novels from the middle-class, urban mainstream of American and Western European literature. If his literary sensibility seems closer to the absurdism of Soviet-era novelists like Mikhail Bulgakov or the fabulist realism of South American masters like Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares, it is perhaps because fantasy and allegory are natural outlets for writers raised under political dictatorship.

In 1926, when Saramago was 3, a military coup overthrew the Portuguese republic. For the following 48 years, Portugal was ruled by a fascist regime whose slogan was ''God, Fatherland, Family.'' In the so-called New State of the dictator Antä(3$)nio Salazar, independent political parties and labor unions were outlawed, the press was ruthlessly censored and the economy was controlled by a few state-favored oligarchs. Salazar's secret police, supposedly modeled on the Gestapo, sent suspected dissidents to the infamous Tarrafal prison in the Cape Verde Islands.

Coelho, Saramago's editor and a fellow Communist, spent the last years of Salazar's regime in hiding. ''Except for our brief moment of glorious exploration in the 16th century,'' he told me, ''Portugal has always been a conservative, inward-looking place. We were ruled by the Jesuits and the Inquisition; we had no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution. It was not a difficult country to control. Salazar hated modernity. His ideal Portuguese was a small poor farmer, very Catholic, very submissive. Everything coming from the outside world was a menace, a potential source of contagion. We lived behind a curtain of silence.''

Saramago grew up in a household thoroughly anchored in the Salazarist system: his father was a policeman who over the years rose to be chief. ''He was not secret police,'' Saramago sought to clarify. ''He was just a street cop, directing traffic, a profession that many uneducated people chose. It was not very nice for him when I later developed quite different political convictions, but there was never any conflict between us.''

Yet in his memoirs, Saramago recounts an episode that suggests the startling violence with which his father could address ''conflict.'' One day, the young Jos?nd his father were playing table football. Saramago Senior was winning mercilessly. Their neighbor, a policeman with the criminal-investigation unit whom Saramago describes as being trained in exerting psychological pressure on prisoners, stood behind the young Jos?hitting him with his foot and taunting him, ''You're losing, you're losing.'' At last, Jos?feeling unbearably humiliated by these two men, jabbed the neighbor's foot and told him to shut up.

Saramago Senior responded to this show of disrespect by hitting his son so hard that he sprawled flat on the concrete floor. ''Neither the father nor the neighbor, both police agents and guardians of public order,'' Saramago writes, ''were conscious that they themselves were lacking in respect for someone who would have to become much older before he could finally tell this sad story. His own story and theirs.''

In the end, the Saramagos' move to Lisbon did not do much to improve the family finances. His mother's spring cleaning consisted of taking their blankets to the pawnbroker; with luck they could be redeemed the following winter. And despite Jos? academic promise, his parents could not afford to keep him in grammar school. At 13, Saramago was shunted into a vocational school, where he trained to be a car mechanic. There, in the school library, he discovered the poems of a man named Ricardo Reis, supposedly a doctor living in Brazil. What the teenager didn't know was that ''Ricardo Reis'' was one of the invented pseudonyms of Portugal's great modernist poet, the fantastically eccentric Fernando Pessoa.

Much as the young Saramago admired Reis's classical restraint, there was one line -- ''Wise is he who is satisfied with the spectacle of the world'' -- that stung him with its cynicism. This line, he explained in his Nobel lecture, eventually inspired the novel that is widely considered his masterpiece, ''The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.''

''ricardo reis,'' which was published in 1984, is a work of richly layered ambiguity. It is also the book in which Saramago deals most directly with the dictatorship under which he spent most of his life. The novel opens in the gloomy, flood-beset winter of 1935. The protagonist Reis, hearing of his friend Pessoa's death, returns to Lisbon from Brazilian exile to visit the poet's grave. Saramago's Reis is a kind of absurdist ''man without qualities,'' and the book's action is minimal: Reis installs himself in a hotel; goes for aimless walks about the city; sits on a park bench, reading the newspaper; exchanges pleasantries with his fellow hotel guests, among them a contingent of rich Spaniards fleeing the ''Reds''; has an affair with a chambermaid; and receives the occasional visit from the ghost of Fernando Pessoa.

In the foreground, stultifyingly polite trivialities. In the background, world-historical disaster: Franco's crushing of Spain's Republican government; Mussolini's murderous conquest of Abyssinia; Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. Reis, who is a conservative monarchist, proves an unconsciously comic transmitter of the day's news: ''Thank heaven there are still voices in this continent, and powerful voices at that, who are prepared to speak out in the name of peace and harmony, we are referring to Hitler. . . . Let the world know that Germany will pursue and cherish peace as no other nation has ever cherished it before.'' Yet what makes the novel so affecting is the restraint with which Saramago portrays his hero's dimly dawning consciousness that his own preconceptions are no longer adequate to an understanding of the world's horrors.

Like all Saramago's fiction, ''Ricardo Reis'' plays on notions of reality and nonreality, being and nonbeing, contrasting Reis, who for all his stubborn particularity is a figment of another writer's imagination, with the mass dissolution of individuality required by Europe's rising totalitarian parties (''We are nothing'' is the slogan recorded in a hotel guest book by a visiting mission of Hitler youth). The novel ends with an image of Pessoa leading an all-too-willing Reis to the realm of the dead.

As a young man Saramago may have been inspired by Reis, but he had none of the sophistication of that cultivated expatriate. ''For my first two years out of school, I was a mechanic at a garage,'' he told me. Over the next three decades, he worked ''in a welfare agency, as a locksmith, at a metal company, as a production manager at a publishing house.'' And also as a translator, magazine critic and newspaper columnist and editorialist. At 22, he married a secretary at the state railway company, who later gained renown as an engraver. In 1947 -- the same year as the birth of his only child, Violante, now a biologist living in Madeira -- Saramago published a first novel that has never been translated into English. It would be 30 years before his next work of fiction (also untranslated) saw the light of day. ''I had nothing to say, so I said nothing,'' is Saramago's characteristically phlegmatic explanation. ''Was I unhappy? Not at all.''

During this time, his marriage fell apart, and he was fired from various jobs for political reasons. ''Did I suffer?'' he asked me. ''No more than the millions of my compatriots living under a regime without freedom.'' In 1969, he made the transition from what he describes as ''critical citizen'' to Communist Party member.

It's not hard to see why Saramago was tempted by Communism. Following the dictates of cold-war realpolitik, the Western democracies were happy to welcome fascist Portugal into Atlanticist institutions like NATO. For decades, the strongest opposition to Salazar's dictatorship came from the Portuguese Communist Party, and its members suffered accordingly. ''I was lucky,'' Saramago told me. ''I was never arrested. Many times it could have happened, but my comrades in prison had the courage and dignity not to betray me.''

Salazar died in 1970, and his successor, Marcelo Caetano, proved incapable of liberalizing a regime that was preposterously obsolete. Portugal was the poorest nation in Western Europe -- a nation whose chief exports were cork, sardines and cheap labor. Yet for 13 years, it was mired in three simultaneous wars halfway around the world. These wars, waged against independence movements in its African colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, consumed more than 40 percent of the national budget. The conflicts were nasty, bloody and increasingly unpopular at home.

On April 25, 1974, rebel leftist armed forces led a successful revolt. By evening, troops occupied Portugal's two major cities, Lisbon and Porto, the government's leaders were under arrest and people were celebrating in the streets. ''I was working at a newspaper,'' Saramago recalled. ''People knew something was about to happen: the regime just needed a little shake to topple it.'' In the euphoric pandemonium that followed, workers occupied factories, landowners' estates were seized by peasants, homeless people took over empty apartment buildings and tram conductors declined to collect passengers' fares. It was a 20th-century anomaly: a successful left-leaning revolution in Western Europe. Within the revolution's first year and a half, three-quarters of the economy was nationalized, and Portugal's African colonies gained independence.

Saramago was appointed deputy director of the formerly fascist Diário de Noticias, a newly nationalized and Communist-dominated newspaper. Under his sway, people claim, it became an unofficial organ of the Communist Party. Many Portuguese intellectuals' dislike of Saramago stems from this period. Jorge de Azevedo, who runs a large book distributor, put it to me this way: ''For Saramago, black is black; there were no different viewpoints, no debate. He was hard on people working at the newspaper who were not party members; he made life extremely difficult for them. Because of this, he has a tough image that remains.''

By the following year, the revolution was unraveling. The country was crippled by strikes. A series of quarrelsome coalition governments collapsed. The military, called in to crush political protests, sometimes obliged, sometimes sided with the protesters. In November 1975, there was a failed coup by leftist factions, after which the country gradually moved into the social-democratic, market-oriented mainstream.

Saramago was promptly fired from his newspaper job. From having been briefly in a position of relative power and influence, he was once again unemployable. ''It was a dark time for him,'' Coelho told me.

Saramago does not agree. ''Being fired was the best luck of my life,'' he told me. ''It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.''

ot many great novelists begin in their late 50s. By that age, Saramago, it is true, had long been publishing op-ed columns or the odd collection of poetry. But there was nothing to prepare readers for the ripely inventive fiction that began pouring out of this late-middle-age ex-newspaper director.

His first big success was ''Balthasar and Blimunda'' in 1987. Set in 18th-century Portugal, Saramago's novel tells the story of a trio of misfits caught up in the Inquisition: a priest bent on constructing a flying machine and the two lovers who serve him -- a one-handed ex-soldier named Balthasar, and Blimunda, a sorceress's daughter. The novel is eccentric, rambling, humorous, touching. In it you see already crystallized the author's enduring habits and preoccupations: his love of lists; his ex-mechanic's fascination with how things are made, whether it be a bellows or a prosthetic hand; his at-once rudimentary and impossibly romantic conception of male-female relations. (In Saramago's novels, a man and a woman fall in love and are forever fused in a lifetime's ecstatic, round-the-clock coupling, a perpetual readiness to rut aided by the fact that in his world there are no children to get in the way.)

Saramago's most distinctive trademark is his punctuation, or rather the lack of it. His fictions are constructed in run-on sentences disrupted by only commas, a flood of prose in which narrative observation, individuals' thoughts and dialogue go unmarked. In addition, many of his books refer to one another, and all the characters talk exactly alike, giving their conversations the feel of an internal monologue. It is as if a continuous reel of a silent film were being projected in a movie theater that is empty save for one extremely garrulous spectator.

That spectator is Saramago's narrator, an unidentified personality who presides over all the novels. The literary critic James Wood has described this narrator's voice as that of ''a sly old Portuguese peasant, who knows everything and nothing.'' The narrator is slightly split, as if, like Saramago's Ricardo Reis, he were always just on the verge of realizing he is the figment of someone else's imagination. His tone is jocular, grumpy, laboriously facetious; he is fond of truisms and of faux-na?theological speculation (does God have one eye or two? Can the Devil fly?). Yet he is also a postmodernist by inclination, fascinated by semantics and the art of grammar. Occasionally, these dual modes -- village gossip and literary theoretician -- converge in such beguiling throwaways as: ''The objectivity of the narrator is a modern invention, we need only reflect that our Lord God didn't want it in his book.''

If Saramago and his narrator are not quite the same person, they do, however, share a fundamental pessimism. ''I'm not delivering any news if I tell you the world is a piece of hell for millions of people,'' Saramago said to me. ''There are always a few who manage to find a way out, humans are capable of the best as well as the worst, but you can't change human destiny. We live in a dark age, when freedoms are diminishing, when there is no space for criticism, when totalitarianism -- the totalitarianism of multinational corporations, of the marketplace -- no longer even needs an ideology, and religious intolerance is on the rise. Orwell's '1984' is already here.''

Can fiction make the world a better place? ''An ethical novel can perhaps influence a reader temporarily,'' he went on, ''but no more. I write as well as I can, but when my readers say, 'Your book has changed my life,' I don't believe it. Maybe like a New Year's resolution -- for a week you try to be good, then you forget.''

Nonetheless, for all his pessimism, in Saramago's most powerful novels there remains a stubborn sprig of utopianism, flickers of ''what if?'' and ''why not?'' In ''The History of the Siege of Lisbon,'' published in 1989, Saramago redevises the past. His hero, Raimundo Silva, is a lonely, impoverished proofreader who, like Melville's Bartleby, finds himself inexplicably driven to an act of quiet sabotage. Correcting a manuscript on the Reconquista of Lisbon in the 12th century, Silva inserts one word in the text that he imagines will change the course of history. In the original text, an army of crusaders on their way to the Holy Land are asked to join King Alfonso's attack on Lisbon: after Silva's amendment, they decide ''not'' to help. The Iberian Peninsula thus presumably remains Muslim, and the world is spared the Inquisition, as well as the discovery of America.

''The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,'' published in 1991, is Saramago's most tetchily subversive work. Saramago is the kind of old-fashioned atheist who is hopping mad at a God who he believes does not exist. His novel's starting point is the Massacre of the Innocents, when Herod, the Roman king of Judea, learns that the future king of the Jews has just been born in Bethlehem and orders that all the baby boys in that village be slaughtered. In Saramago's telling, Joseph, husband of Mary, overhears the collective death sentence by chance and manages to hide his own son while leaving the others to perish. It is therefore in atonement for his earthly father's sin in indirectly colluding with Herod's iniquity, as well as for God's in allowing the massacre to occur, that Jesus is later forced to give his life. (The amateur Freudian may wonder if there isn't an echo here of a Communist son's guilt at his father's serving as a policeman under Salazar.) On the cross, Saramago's Jesus asks humankind to forgive God his sins.

''The Gospel'' polarized readers, both in Portugal and abroad, and led to Saramago's self-imposed symbolic exile in the Canary Islands. The effect on Saramago's work has been stark. His Canary Island novels are denuded of all the aching particularity, the clamor, reek and clutter of his Portugal works: austere and monitory parables, they often take place in an allegorical urban landscape as stylized as a computer game. In a book like ''Las Intermitencias de la Muerte,'' which will be published in the United States in the spring, his subject is nothing less than the folly of man's search for eternal life.

To some observers, Saramago's exile has made him less relevant than other contemporary Portuguese greats like Antonio Lobo Antunes, who, using the polyphonic techniques of high modernism, continues to explore the psychic wounds left by Portugal's recent political history. To others, Saramago has taken on the role of a more universal conscience, giving his literary fables about the failures of democracy or the tyranny of corporations a broader reach.

For the director Fernando Meirelles, who is making the film of ''Blindness,'' this universalism was the great achievement of that work. ''It's an allegory about the fragility of civilization,'' Meirelles told me. ''Ten years ago, I wanted to make my first feature film from the book -- I was attracted by the paradox of making something visual about sightlessness -- but Saramago said no. Whoopi Goldberg and Gael Garcá Bernal both tried to buy the rights; he refused. Finally, my producer and screenwriter came to the Canary Islands and spent two days with Saramago and talked him into it.''

Saramago acknowledged to me that many people approached him about filming ''Blindness.'' ''I always resisted,'' he said, ''because it's a violent book about social degradation, rape, and I didn't want it to fall into the wrong hands.''

today saramago is planning his next novel. ''Maybe it's my last book,'' he ventured during our conversation in Lisbon. ''When I finish a book, I wait for the next idea, and sometimes it takes a long time, and I get worried. When I finished 'Pequenas Memä(3$)rias,' I wondered if the cycle was now complete. I had for the first time in my life a sense of finitude, and it was not a pleasant feeling. Everything seemed little, insignificant. I'm 84. I could live perhaps another three, four years. The worst that death has is that you were here, and now you're not.''

He glanced over at his wife with almost a twinkle in his eyes and said to her: ''If I'd died before I met you, Pilar, I'd have died feeling much older.'' He continued: ''At 63, my second life began. I can't complain. The things you think are a big deal are not so big. I've won the Nobel Prize. And so?''

Saramago's novels seem, like the flying machine in ''Baltasar and Blimunda,'' to be propelled by the sheer force of human will. Sometimes their author's mulishness leaves him, in his public life, stuck up a tree, with his unswerving allegiance to a political ideology that has buttressed many of the world's most murderous tyrannies. But long after Saramago's dusty jeremiads are forgotten, readers will still relish his sly tales of one-handed soldiers and sorceresses' daughters, of proofreaders with the power to overturn history with an inserted ''not.'' 

Citador #1 - a palavra "mundo"

Citador #1
a palavra "mundo"

Entrevista a O Jornal
Janeiro de 1983

Saramago define a palavra "mundo"

«Para mim o mundo é uma espécie de enigma constantemente renovado. Cada vez que o olho estou sempre a ver as coisas pela primeira vez. O mundo tem muito mais para me dizer do que aquilo que sou capaz de entender. Daí que me tenha de abrir a um entendimento sem baias, de forma a que tudo caiba nele.»

José Saramago - dos manuscritos... da velha Hermes, até ao portátil

Do seu punho, escrito desde os idos tempos em que os primeiros rascunhos dificilmente teriam a sorte de serem bafejados com a luz do dia; passando aos dias em que usava uma muito comentada "velha máquina Hermes", onde deverá ter rezado a paz à sua alma, como se uma máquina a pudesse ter, com o final do trabalhoso dactilografar de "O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis". E por fim, o computador e o portátil de secretária.
Não me é difícil de imaginar o homem, saltando estas etapas, criando condições para que o fluir das duas linhas fossem tão compatíveis com o andamento com que escrevia. Referia ele, que era escritor de poucas rasuras... soube acompanhar os dias...





23 de Junho de 2009, por ocasião do lançamento de "O Caderno" - João Céu e Silva apresenta esta crónica no DN

"José Saramago mais virtual do que nunca"

"Ao Nobel já não faltam muitas experiências de vida. Desta vez, quem dispensar a  razão física da existência pode assistir à apresentação de 'O Caderno' em qualquer parte do planeta.
Da velha máquina de escrever Hermes, em que ainda dactilografou O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis, até ao moderno computador portátil em que já escreveu A Viagem do Elefante, foi um longo caminho para José Saramago, que se diz ser pouco dado às tecnologias. Mas essa sua afirmação parece ser quase tão etérea quanto o espaço virtual onde se iniciou quase diariamente, por imposição da mulher, Pilar del Río, e cuja produção bloguista já resulta em livros, como o que esta quinta-feira será lançado oficialmente em Lisboa.



O Caderno de José Saramago reúne textos que o escritor vai colocando, por norma, entre segundas e sextas-feiras no seu blogue - e que o DN reproduz em simultâneo - e trata de temas tão diversos como a reconstituição do percurso do seu último romance, o comentário à oferta que Hugo Chávez fez a Obama, um exemplar do livro As Veias Abertas da América Latina, de Eduardo Galeano, e que tanta polémica provocou ou a entrada intitulada A Coisa Berlusconi, que ainda mais celeuma gerou.
Os textos de O Caderno não são um género novo no Nobel, que já o cultivou nos cinco volumes de Cadernos de Lanzarote, mas desta vez tem o picante de nascerem na Internet e de as reacções serem em tempo real. São estas implicações na literatura e do comentário sobre a sociedade que o escritor irá eleger na apresentação do volume que reúne algumas dezenas de posts, numa sessão que conta com a participação de dois bloguistas assumidos, a Ciberescritas Isabel Coutinho e o Bibliotecáriodebabel José Mário Silva, e que irão comentar o meio ano de vida do Blogjosesaramago.
Antes mesmo da sessão, já se sabe um pouco da opinião do escritor sobre a actividade dos blogues. Em entrevista ao jornal argentino Clarín, Saramago contesta a ligeireza com que muitos escrevem neste espaço: "A prática do blogue levou muitas pessoas que antes pouco ou nada escreviam a escrever. Pena que muitas delas pensem que não vale a pena se preocupar com a qualidade do que se escreve." E acrescentou: "Pessoalmente cuido tanto do texto de um blogue como de uma página de romance."



Egas Moniz - um Nobel esquecido? - Saramago questiona

A propósito do ano (1973) em que se preparavam, pelas instituições da altura, as comemorações dos 100 anos do nascimento de Egas Moniz, José Saramago lança umas farpas direccionados ao aspecto festivaleiro da sociedade - "Está-nos na massa do sangue o vício da efeméride, corremos ansiosamente ao consolo lisonjeador da sessão solene, aperfeiçoamos todos os dias a técnica do descerramento de lápides..."
Este aspecto, o do folclore para inglês, poderá dizer-se assim mesmo, foi algo que sempre inquietava Saramago - os beberetes, as festas para aparecer na fotografia, a pompa e circunstância do momento que contrariava o natura apoio e reconhecimento fora das festanças.

Esta crónica, de 13 de Agosto de 1973, publicada no Diário de Lisboa com o titulo "A Propósito de Egas Moniz", é compilada no livro "Os Apontamentos - Crónicas Políticas".
Qual a razão do espanto?
Qual o motivo para a menção?

(...) Mas nós falámos em surpresa, e ainda por cima demo-la como legítima. Importa pois que nos expliquemos. Merecidas e justificadas serão todas as homenagens que venham a prestar-se ao homem de ciência que foi o professor Egas Moniz, nosso único prémio Nobel até esta data. Não é por aqui que a surpresa se introduz. (...)
Mas onde a surpresa se legitima é quando vemos que a ideia da homenagem vem, senão das mesmas pessoas, de instâncias que, em rigor, respondem no espírito e na substância, a uma anterior recusa displicente em reconhecer os méritos do futuro homenageado, em nome e por causa de divergências de ordem política. (...) 
  


Este, o motivo da estranheza, os mesmos que não toleram e impõem um regime de pensamento único político, são os que se preparam para lançar vivas ao prémio. Ao prémio, porque é sempre disso que se trata.
E continua...

(...) Não custa nada agora dizer que Egas Moniz foi um cidadão exemplar além do sábio que também era: como sábio amesquinhou-o a sua própria terra, e como cidadão não mereceram respeito as suas opções políticas. Mesmo hoje uma pergunta se justifica: merecerão mais respeito essas opções, ou simplesmente se «perdoam» elas a Egas Moniz graças ao lugar que ele ocupa na ciência mundial? E como considera o país aqueles filhos que não juntem as suas convicções democráticas à descoberta da leucotomia pré-frontal?... (fim de crónica) 



20 anos depois, agora com José Saramago, encontra-se um paralelo. 
Um directório de pensamento único, em tempos de suposta democracia, já na década de 90, vai mais longe do que o "marcelismo" afrontou Egas Moniz.
José Saramago, que levava Portugal e os portugueses a todos os cantos do mundo, traduzido em muitas línguas; o homem que deu a conhecer a história de amor entre Baltazar e Blimunda, num lugar chamado Mafra, era carimbado com o carimbo vermelho e o lápis azul da censura. 
A tristeza deste paralelo, tratando-se de não compreender/aceitar a obra e a opção livre e democrática no pensamento de cada um, mesmo quando é diferente do vulgo sistema, foi mais vincada e agressiva com José Saramago.
Aquando da sua morte, em Portugal (e só por cá) onde as honras de estado eram mais do que obrigatórias, seriam unificadoras em redor de um símbolo nacional, apresentaram-se patéticas. O sistema colocou tentacularmente os seus braços invisíveis, mas assas cirúrgicos, de fora. 
Este sistema, que se escudou sempre atrás de subsecretários de estado ou de meros serviçais, nunca perdoou a Saramago a sua palavra persistente e desassossegada; o seu reconhecimento pelo mundo fora; a inveja de um suposto sucesso; o alinhamento por um pensamento democrático que se queriam em desuso.
Este o paralelo encontrado por Saramago em 1973, tem a devida distância - de o ser não sendo. Em 1973, Saramago não lhe apeteceria pensar no Nobel, mas o tempo verificou esta causalidade de circunstâncias e semelhanças com Egas Moniz - também este um Nobel algo proscrito.

Agora, em 2014, Egas Moniz é nome de escolas, ruas, centros de enfermagem - mas não passa de simples menções. Portugal, e aquilo que é a sua arquitectura do pensamento, pretende esquecer estes patrimónios. Mais do que uma estátua no Hospital Santa Maria, a ideia de que somos portadores de 2 prémios Nobel não faz parte do compêndio.     



"Em 1992, o subsecretário da Cultura, António Sousa Lara, vetou a candidatura do romance "O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo", de José Saramago, ao Prémio Literário Europeu, justificando tal decisão dizendo que a obra não representava Portugal mas, antes, desunia o povo português. Em consequência do que considerou ser um acto de censura por parte do governo português, Saramago mudou-se em 1993 para Espanha, passando a viver em Lanzarote, nas ilhas Canárias."



Egas Moniz, dados via Wikipédia em http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/António_Egas_Moniz

António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz GCSE • GCB (Estarreja, Avanca, 29 de novembro de 1874 — Lisboa, 13 de dezembro de 1955) foi um médico, neurologista, investigador, professor, político e escritor português.
Foi galardoado com o Nobel de Fisiologia ou Medicina de 1949, partilhado com Walter Rudolf Hess.
Nascido António Caetano de Abreu Freire de Resende no seio de uma família aristocrata rural, a dos Viscondes de Baçar, seu tio e padrinho, o padre, Caetano de Pina Resende Abreu e Sá Freire, insistiria para que ao apelido (sobrenome) fosse adicionado Egas Moniz, em virtude de a família de Resende descender em linha directa de Egas Moniz, o aio de Dom Afonso Henriques.
O Aio Egas Moniz (1080-1146) antepassado do neurologista português, apareceu com sua família antes de o rei de Leão. Mosaico na estação São Bento (Porto), por Jorge Colaço (1864-1942)
Formação e actividade académica[editar | editar código-fonte]
Completou a instrução primária na Escola do Padre José Ramos, em Pardilhó, e o Curso Liceal no Colégio de S. Fiel, dos Jesuítas, em Louriçal do Campo, concelho de Castelo Branco. Formou-se em Medicina na Universidade de Coimbra, onde começou por ser lente substituto, leccionando anatomia e fisiologia. Em 1911 foi transferido para a recém-criada Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Lisboa onde foi ocupar a cátedra de neurologia como professor catedrático. Reformou-se em Fevereiro de 1944.
Em 1950 é fundado, no Hospital Júlio de Matos, o Centro de Estudos Egas Moniz, do qual é presidente. O Centro de Estudos é, em 1957 transferido para o serviço de Neurologia do Hospital de Santa Maria onde existe ainda hoje compreendendo, entre outros, o Museu Egas Moniz (onde se encontra uma restituição do seu gabinete de trabalho com as peças originais, vários manuscritos, entre outros).
Egas Moniz contribuiu decisivamente para o desenvolvimento da medicina ao conseguir pela primeira vez dar visibilidade às artérias do cérebro. A Angiografia Cerebral, que descobriu após longas experiências com raios X, tornou possível localizar neoplasias, aneurismas, hemorragias e outras mal-formações no cérebro humano e abriu novos caminhos para a cirurgia cerebral.
As suas descobertas clínicas foram reconhecidas pelos grandes neurologistas da época, que admiravam a acuidade das suas análises e observações.
A 5 de Outubro de 1928 foi agraciado com a Grã-Cruz da Ordem de Benemerência e a 3 de Março de 1945 com a Grã-Cruz da Ordem Militar de Sant'Iago da Espada.1
Egas Moniz teve também papel activo na vida política. Foi fundador do Partido Republicano Centrista, dissidência do Partido Evolucionista; apoiou o breve regime de Sidónio Pais, durante o qual exerceu as funções de Embaixador de Portugal em Madrid (1917) e Ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros (1918); viu entretanto o seu partido fundir-se com o Partido Sidonista. Foi ainda um notável escritor e autor de uma notável obra literária, de onde se destacam as obras "A nossa casa" e "Confidências de um investigador científico".
Faleceu em Lisboa, a 13 de Dezembro de 1955.