José Saramago’s “death with Interruptions»

Resounding success and public recognition can play a cruel joke on a person. By nature, we are very vulnerable creatures, susceptible to external pleasant stimuli, emotionally unstable, so any significant achievement can disrupt the basis of the order that, in fact, helped to reach the heights — painstaking work. We have already learned from the work of Scott Fitzgerald how a person reached unprecedented heights in his life, but, being a prisoner of his own charm, he could not return to the previous level. In literature, this universal recognition is the award of the Nobel prize. Glamour, prestige, accepting the “secular society” — all this does not necessarily influence the writer in a positive way. In 1998, when this prize was awarded to Jose Saramago, there must have been good reason to believe that this Portuguese — a diligent and diligent writer — would be able to avoid the consequences of vanity. However ,the “development” of his subsequent works, including the book “Interruptions in death”, the unconvincing novel “Epiphany”, as well as the obviously hastily finished book” Cain”, suggests unambiguous results. I do not want to accuse the writer of mediocrity, and his subsequent books — of lack of ideas, but they clearly show a line of inferiority, especially after the inimitable texts that he previously gave to the world.

Critics sometimes distinguish two peak stages in the work of Jose Saramago, one of which fell on the early years, and the second coincided with the publication of the amazing book “Blindness” — a kind of parable about social decline — and the publication of the monumental work “the gospel of Jesus”. In the same years, he received the Nobel prize. Obviously, we do not have any indisputable reasons to link the award to the author with his subsequent creative decline, but we can draw a parallel, however. Unfortunately, the great Portuguese is no longer with us, so we will never get a rebuttal to the prevailing opinion.