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Portuguese writer José Saramago published his first novel in 1947, at 24, and his next only thirty years later. His breakthrough, Memorial do Convento (Baltasar and Blimunda in English), came out in 1982, the year he turned 60, and in 1998 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

José Saramago

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In those years Saramago earned his living as a car mechanic, a civil servant in the social welfare service, an editor and translator at a publishing house, and a journalist, while publishing poetry and essays. A novel he wrote in the 1950s, Claraboia, stayed unpublished until after his death, in 2011. He returned to fiction with Manual of Painting and Calligraphy in 1977 and found his mature style: long, flowing sentences with dialogue run into the text without quotation marks. Memorial do Convento, set in eighteenth-century Portugal while the vast convent at Mafra was being built, follows a one-handed soldier, a young woman who can see inside people and a priest who dreams of flying. He was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel.

Türkçe oku
Portekizli yazar José Saramago ilk romanını 1947'de, 24 yaşında yayımladı; ikincisi ancak otuz yıl sonra geldi. Ününü getiren Memorial do Convento (Türkçede Baltasar ile Blimunda) 1982'de, altmış yaşına bastığı yıl çıktı; 1998'de de Nobel Edebiyat Ödülü'nü kazandı.

Saramago bu yıllarda geçimini otomobil tamirciliği, sosyal yardım kurumunda memurluk, bir yayınevinde editörlük ve çevirmenlik, ardından gazetecilikle sağladı; bu arada şiir ve deneme kitapları da yayımladı. 1950'lerde yazdığı Claraboia adlı roman, ancak ölümünden sonra, 2011'de yayımlandı. Kurmacaya 1977'de Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia ile döndü ve olgunluk döneminin üslubunu buldu: konuşmaları tırnak işareti kullanmadan anlatının içine katan uzun, akışkan cümleler. Memorial do Convento, 18. yüzyıl Portekiz'inde, Mafra'daki dev manastırın yapıldığı yıllarda geçer; tek elli bir askerin, insanların içini görebilen genç bir kadının ve uçmayı düşleyen bir rahibin hikâyesini anlatır. Saramago, Nobel Edebiyat Ödülü'nü alan ilk Portekizce yazardı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: José Saramago
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