José Saramago - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

FERNANDA EBERSTADT “José Saramago, Nobel Prize-Winning Writer, Dies” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/books/19saramago.html

葡萄牙の小説家で、葡萄牙語で書く作家としては最初で（今のところ）唯一のノーベル文学賞受賞者であるJosé Saramago氏が亡くなる。享年87歳。記事の最後にあるハロルド・ブルームのコメントを引用しておく；

“Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world,” the critic Harold Bloom said in 2008. “He was the equal of Philip Roth, Günther Grass, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile — he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.”

また、彼は非妥協的共産主義者としても知られるが、上の記事では”To many Americans, Mr. Saramago’s name is associated with a statement he made while touring the West Bank in 2002, when he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.”とも述べられている。