In the writer José Saramago lived together "the worker of letters with the prince of literature", a personality that he forged throughout his life and allowed him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, according to the director of the César Manrique Foundation, Fernando Gómez Aguilera.
This is one of the conclusions of the new book by Gómez Aguilera, a specialist in the Portuguese writer, "José Saramago. The bird that chirps perched on the rhinoceros", whose appearance is part of the commemorative events of the centenary of the birth of the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner.
The book analyzes the work written by Saramago after his move to Lanzarote, the third cycle of his narrative, which responds to its own characteristics, according to the specialist.
Gómez Aguilera considers that from the study of Saramago's literary work it can be deduced that "his ideas and intellectual spirit maintain a vigorous capacity for interpellation and dialogue with our time".
In his opinion, in that third stage Saramago stars in "a radical break" in his fiction from "Essay on Blindness" (1995), the first novel written in Lanzarote, where he then established his residence in the town of Tías, in the Lanzarote municipality of the same name.
Already on the Canary Island, Saramago begins his third life as a writer (1993-2010), "resets" himself as such and begins the new cycle with his great work of this moment, "Essay on Blindness", with which, according to Gómez Aguilera, "he opens himself to the world, expands his voice and strengthens his profile as a great critical intellectual of universal scope".
In his opinion, the causes that provoked this change in the Nobel Prize winner's work were the "exhausting" experience of "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ"; the relationship with his wife Pilar del Río; the fact of residing in Lanzarote, which allows him to discover its landscape and recover emotions of childhood and youth in Azinhaga, his Portuguese hometown, and the international opening of the author, especially to Latin America.
For the specialist in the Portuguese writer, after settling in Lanzarote, a new literature emerged that Saramago himself called "the stone" and that he recognized as a "radical break" with the previous production, to focus on reflecting on the life of contemporary human beings and their social, political and economic context.
Gómez Aguilera highlights Saramago's ability "as an intellectual and narrator to warn about the deviations of the system and question it", something that occurs both in his literature and in his public activism as a citizen and intellectual committed to his time.
"He deployed a very dynamic critical vigilance, characteristic of his personality, far from indifference and aesthetic isolation".
The title chosen for the essay "José Saramago. The bird that chirps perched on the rhinoceros" comes from an expression of the well-known literary critic of French origin George Steiner, in reference to an experience he had during a trip to Africa in a reserve, in which he observed "those precious yellow birds that perch on the rhinoceros and chirp like crazy to warn that the rhinoceros is approaching".
The book, with a prologue by Pilar del Río, widow of the Portuguese writer, includes literary studies dedicated to most of Saramago's books written in Lanzarote from 1992, when he established his residence in the Canary Islands accompanied by his wife.
Pilar del Río believes that Gómez Aguilera's book, "one of the people who knew Samago best", will be a fundamental work for the study of the Portuguese writer's literary production and the text is already being studied in universities in several countries.
