Saramago Wins Nobel By David Streitfeld Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 9, 1998; Page D01

Novelist Jose Saramago. (Reuters)

The Nobel inspires fierce yearning among writers, some of whom probably checked the phone late Wednesday to make sure any calls at dawn would go through unimpeded. But Saramago is peculiar.

"I have never had any ambition," he's maintained more than once. After he wrote an unsuccessful novel at the age of 25, he did "nothing in particular" for the next few decades. The first novel that anyone paid attention to – "Baltasar and Blimunda," a droll tale of horror and love set in the 18th century – didn't appear until 1982, when he was 60.

It's probably a Nobel record to get the prize after a career of only 16 years, but Saramago was reportedly a favorite. The announcement was marked by none of the puzzlement that greeted last year's selection of offbeat Italian playwright and actor Dario Fo.

Still, just to provide a sense of continuity, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano labeled Saramago's selection "yet another ideologically slanted award." Like Fo, Saramago has gotten in trouble with the Catholic Church, in his case for writing "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ." Maybe it's the scene that depicts the hero surrendering his virginity to Mary Magdalene.

"The Catholics crucified me," the novelist said in a recent interview, noting that some of their letters to him "had the characteristics of inquisitors and offered incredible insults."

The Nobel is often accused of being politically correct, handed out on the basis of geographic or ethnic or linguistic predilections. If true, this was the year for a Communist. Saramago, who will be 76 next month, is one of the last true believers.

"It's never been easier to be a Communist than now," he says, "because there's so few of us."

Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio tried to glide over that affiliation, unsuccessfully. "This prize is recognition of Portuguese culture," he said. "It is important for all of us, regardless of our personal convictions."

America's leading man of letters, Harold Bloom, had no need to waffle. "Oh, this is very good news! They called me from Stockholm a few weeks ago, canvassing various names, and there were none I liked. Saramago was not mentioned. So I'm surprised."

Bloom, who put Saramago into "The Western Canon," his account of the essential works of literature, added that "so few who have gotten the Nobel in the last 15 years are worthy of it. But Saramago is. Like Borges, who I think had a certain effect on him, like Kafka, who clearly had an effect on him, like Beckett to some degree, Saramago writes phantasmagoria – what in the old days would be called a romance rather than a novel. In the midst of the most astonishing fantasy he has a dry, meticulous sense of detail. It's very eloquent stuff."

In its citation, the Swedish Academy said the $985,000 prize was going to a writer who, "with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an illusory reality."

Now living in the Canary Islands, Saramago is married for the second time. The major decision of his life, he said recently, was "not to evade love when it arrives . . . I've lived with Pilar for 12 years and have the sensation that everything before her was preparation – too long – in order to arrive where I am now."

If Saramago's writing career began late, he's been making up for lost time, publishing nine substantial works of fiction. Six of them have been published here, including just last month "Blindness," about an epidemic in which nearly everyone loses their sight.

When the news came out, Saramago was on his way to the airport from the Frankfurt Book Fair, the annual conclave where publishers buy and sell the rights to issue books. His first inclination was to board the plane home anyway. But his publisher dragged him back to the fair.

Before a clamoring press contingent, he celebrated his award as a victory for the Portuguese language, which had never had a Nobel laureate before.

"There have to be ways and means of protecting the language so that it does not become a museum but is something that is alive," Saramago said, according to a report filed by Reuters. "The writer's role is to protect it and work with it."

He's always been alert to any aspersions on the status of Portuguese. In an interview with The Washington Post three years ago, Saramago recalled that at a conference on European literature in France, he was asked to speak for 30 minutes on the question "Is Portuguese literature European?"

"For the first 15 minutes," he said, "I spoke about what I thought about the person who asked me to address this topic."

He was more lighthearted yesterday with the obligatory question about what he would do with the money. "Have you any suggestions?" he asked.

Saramago couldn't afford a book until he was 18. His family, he once said, was "poor, poor, poor. The ground of my house was of mud and, in the night, you could see the stars between the joints of the tiles on the roof. When it rained hard, it rained inside the house."

He'll soon be able to afford splendid roofs, and everything that goes under them. On the Amazon.com bestseller chart, "Blindness" went from 467 shortly after the award was announced to 7 by midafternoon.

Older titles had even more dramatic rises. "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" went from 54,094 to 129. The Nobel Prize doesn't make a writer into John Grisham, but it gives him a shot at a solid readership.

The award is a vote of confidence for Harcourt Brace, Saramago's American publisher. Harcourt is one of the very few major publishers with a strong commitment to literature in translation – a devotion that has paid off with recent Nobels to Mexican polymath Octavio Paz, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska and now Saramago.

Sometimes such faith is rewarded. Harcourt is printing up another 50,000 copies of "Blindness" – four times as many as were available last week.

Saramago's favorite among his books is "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis," about a man who suspects he is merely the literary creation of Portugal's best-known poet, Fernando Pessoa.

The year referred to in the title is significant: It's 1936, the beginning of the Salazar dictatorship. "The Portuguese are given to melancholy," the novelist once told journalist Isabel Hilton. "And there was no sense of the future. It was like a nation of resigned people. Something of that lingers in our collective existence – the idea of a people who still don't understand how it was possible that in the 15th and 16th centuries they achieved what they achieved."

Those were the days in which the Portuguese built an empire. Yesterday, with only words, Saramago allowed them to taste glory again.