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“... All José Saramago’s novels tell a story. Each is predicated on a suggestive and compelling hypothesis: what would happen if the Iberian peninsula were to become detached from the European mainland (The Stone Raft), what would happen if everyone in a country lost their eyesight (Blindness), what would have happened if the crusaders had refused to help the beleaguered Portuguese in 1147 (The History of the Siege of Lisbon)? From these impossible premises, more or less logical consequences follow, more or less fabulously narrated; with light digressions, tense asides and much moody self-reflexiveness ...”

“... so there was no choice but to destroy as much of Rafah as possible, and as soon as possible. José Saramago, visiting Israel in March 2002, before the invasion in which Israel reoccupied the territories, said that Israel had two problems. The first, he said, is that the settlements need the army. Everyone agreed. The second is that the army needs ...”

“... for writers like Calvino and Kundera, to say nothing of Eco. And to say something, now, of José Saramago. Saramago, born in 1922, has published seven novels. Five of them are available in English (Baltasar and Blimunda, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The Manual of ...”

“... José Saramago’s last work of fiction, published in Portugal in 2009, the year before he died, created something of a furore there. It is less likely to ruffle feathers in the English-speaking world, where scathing critiques of the Bible, in fiction and even in biblical scholarship, have been commonplace since the 18th century ...”

“... by placing him in the capacious context of such postwar avant-garde novelists as Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago and David Foster Wallace, only to acknowledge that, despite a shared affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai was ‘perhaps the strangest’ of them. The writer is ‘peculiar’; his work is ‘strange and ...”

“... an old gossip from the village. And a foolish one, too, censorious and witless at the same time. (José Saramago is the contemporary novelist most fond of this technique.) Giovanni Verga was a patrician, and he did not always write like this. He was born in Catania, in 1840, into a landowning family. At school, a patriotic teacher inspired him to write ...”

“... now. In All the Names (1997), his poignant novel about the yearning to encompass everyone, José Saramago issues a warning. The protagonist tries to stop a nurse washing a minor scrape on his knee, but she says: ‘No no, I have to clean them.’ He replies: ‘Once mine have healed, they’ll leave nothing but a few small scars that will ...”

“... in time of trouble, and avoidance of extremes’. In a way, he outlived Pessoa, since the novelist José Saramago carried him on in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which he returns to Lisbon after Pessoa’s death.The real Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. His father died when he was five; three years later his mother remarried a ...”

“... that didn’t reach the status of a fully fleshed novel (no mean feat unless your name is José Saramago), and I gave up before the hundred-page mark. Valérie Tong Cuong’s Voltiges, also published this year, is much more resourceful.2 This is a family saga of sorts, unfolding at a leisurely pace and with a rich psychology, but stripped of any ...”