Portuguese school literature IV: Saramago, Portugal’s favourite traitor.

This text is about a man named José, a man who hated his own country but is considered a national hero.

Born in 1922 on the Alentejo, he was registered with the wrong surname and ended up being named after a tree (“Saramago” means wild radish), he started as a car mechanic but ended up being a journalist, however he was fired and started writing books, the same books that made him go to exile to the Canary Islands.

I dont know why schools want to make famous a literal traitor who hated our country, but his books arent even that good:

* *Memorial do Convento* : A book about a queen that cant get pregnant.
* *O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis*: Plagiarism
* *Ensaio sobre a cegueira* : A book that was so bad that he admited that it was the worst thing that he wrote.
* *O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo*: The Bible but with some bad jokes.
* *O conto da ilha desconhecida*: Some crazy navigators trying to find an island that doesnt exist.

He was known for his horrible way of writing, for example, he didnt like to write full stops and didnt use the quotarion marks, but it can be justified because he was from the countryside and he never learned to write correctly.

Despite his works being ridiculous, he has his own foundation and when he died he received a state funeral, and now we know here in Portugal that firing journalists can have catastrofic consequences.

>”This is a frankly terrible book that I want the reader to suffer as much as I did when I wrote it. It describes a long torture. It’s a brutal and violent book and at the same time one of the most painful experiences of my life. It’s 300 pages of constant affliction. Through writing, I tried to say that we are not good and that we need to have the courage to recognize that.”

Text before the beginning of *Ensaio sobre a cegueira*, I am not joking.

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by CRNXD38