the village Azinhaga there is a small museum and a monument, because here is on 16 José Saramago Born November 1922. The high school he had to cancel because finance his parents, although Saramago's father was a policeman, this had become unmanageable. Yet it is the poverty that has set José Saramago's life a different direction. He is fitter.
with the novels "Hope in the Alentejo and " The Memorial " He gained his literary breakthrough. In "Hope in the Alentejo" unfolds for the first time the art of language that permeates his upcoming novels. Saramago was an atheist, blogger and member of Attac. the novel "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" held the Catholic church for blasphemy, because this novel, the Portuguese government denied the author the European Culture Prize.
In "Hope in the Alentejo" Saramago tells the story of a day laborer family for four generations, beginning in 1900 until the Carnation Revolution. The rural population is characterized by unspeakable poverty. Among landowners make it compulsory labor from sunrise to sunset. Domingos Mau-Tempo, the first offspring of the family moves, with donkey. Carts, woman and child across the country. It rains terribly. One could easily imagine the whole of Portugal wine flowing, because Domingos, the shoemaker, will achieve nothing in his life, only he is a drunk who leaves a posterity of empty stomachs.
"... what should a man do otherwise if he has a wife and child - these faces with big eyes of hunger - the stretch her chin on the table and the scantily covered with moistened finger chase the crumbs, as if it ants. "
So strike. It will only be required, what is due to the workers, but the uprising of Guarda, the servants of the dictatorship is defeated.
"... they keep their rifles at the ready, without it they do not feel as human beings."
Following prison, torture, and some find death.
"The ants are surprised when this major Mass suddenly falls from the top down, but they are not taken, not even touched upon. In the time that they leave him to keep an ant stuck to his clothes, they want to see him up close, it is stupid, because they will die first. Exactly where it is just the first blow stick falls down, the second they feel already no longer ...."
"Every year at the same time home to call their sons. " Everyone knows war brings destruction, weapons of war are products of inhumanity. Saramago does say this not so directly, but were specifically aimed at the effect of the text from. Just as good literature is created. Saramago does speak a voice that always seems to be louder and more insistent, as if this voice will penetrate the full force of the skull of the reader who wants to nail down in the skull. My summary of the first few lines of this passage is very ridiculous when I think over the words Saramago. Finally, I am partial but over in Saramago's text because I can not not be. António Mau tempo to start the service on the weapon. "The homeland calls her sons." B Isher they had been worth nothing. At the door of the village hall is a note written on the name displayed. Since Antonio can not read, typed a "with the index finger on the line that curls like a black worm, you are, this worm your name that the writer has written the Rekrutierbezirks is ..."
José Saramago has written a novel about the suffering of Portugal, not only flowed the blood of the twentieth century, but this closes the blood has flowed the blood of hundreds of years before with one. It is no coincidence that the clan of Domingos Mau-pace of the fruit of a raped mother's womb from the fifteenth century comes.
for much of the novel, the reader might get the impression that his novel Saramago would prefer to call in the Alentejo hopeless, but the author believed in the possibility of a better world. Unique artistic language, authentic. José Saramago was a great connoisseur of the history of his country.
