Listening to Pilar del RÃo talk about José Saramago invites, and encourages, you to return to your home library and read some of those works that made the Portuguese writer a key piece of world literary memory. “He was a man full of humanity,” the journalist explained yesterday at the L’Iber de València museum in conversation with Javier de Lucas, professor of Philosophy of Law. A dialogue that was held about the book, The intuition of the island, the days of José Saramago in Lanzarote in which Pilar del RÃo describes moments, conversations, emotions and even surprises that the Nobel Prize lived on the island.
Javier de Lucas warned: Pilar del RÃo has one of the most sought-after agendas. “Everyone is there,” the Valencian professor pointed out, and he was right. The journalist has become a world reference on Saramago, the person who offers the most coherence when it comes to explaining the work and author, which is not always an easy task in other cases. “What was it like to live next to a genius?” someone from the audience asked him yesterday: “it wasn’t that complicated, he had his things as you know, but he always looked at the world with the need to improve it.”
He narrated amusing anecdotes about the character, such as his complaint about not wearing a shirt when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, news he received in Lanzarote. “And we told him that he could buy thousands,” said Pilar del RÃo with a laugh. Also his political commitment, “of a man who was a communist, who suffered enormous censorship in his country, and of enormous tolerance.” Or how the creative processes were always intense in an author who joined literature late compared to other generational colleagues.
Saramago arrived in the Canary Islands after the Cavaco Silva government vetoed the candidacy of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ for the European Literary Award in 1992. From censorship to freedom there was a period of enormous happiness, where essential works of contemporary literature were conceived such as Essay on Blindness, Flashes of Death or La Caverna. Pilar del RÃo was the one who offered a portrait of those days yesterday that are part of a work, The Intuition of the Island, which is perhaps the best portrait of a universal author.
Pilar’s book shares with whoever reads it unique moments that occurred in A Casa, the walks around Lanzarote, the ideas from which her novels arose, the coexistence with her dogs, the encounters on the island with friends like Carlos Fuentes, Ernesto Sábato, Susan Sontag or Bertolucci, the experiences she brought from her travels and the friendships forged. An irreplaceable book that seeks to continue the breath that is felt in A Casa and to share it. A book for friends and friends.
