![]() A baroque tale set during the Inquisition in 18th-century Lisbon, it tells of the love between a maimed soldier and a young clairvoyant, and of a renegade priest's heretical dream of flight. ![]() He was 60 when his breakthrough fourth novel, Memorial of the Convent (1982), was published. He first worked as a car mechanic and metal-worker before eventually devoting himself to fiction in his 50s. "I don't see it as a miracle," he makes clear (he is an atheist), "but my chances of recovering were very slim." Yet it also suggests an ironic stance towards his late fame. ![]() His amusement may stem from a mischievous sense of thwarting expectations, as much as delight at his reprieve. Rushed to hospital last winter with a respiratory illness, he recalls: "They were reluctant to take me because I was in such a serious condition." Chuckling, he adds: "they didn't want to be the hospital where José Saramago died." Frail and unflaggingly upright in posture, he is in an armchair in his compact, postwar house in Lisbon, sheltering from the city's Atlantic drizzle beside a smoking log fire. ![]() ![]() T here is a revealing moment when José Saramago, Portugal's austere Nobel laureate, relaxes into laughter, and it comes as he is talking of his own death. ![]()
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