Environmental crisis in José Saramago`s fiction

Abstract

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, was one of the fiercest critics of our time of the European economic, political, social and environmental crisis. The latter In particular, as well as its implications and consequences, was subjected to an attentive, detained and in-depth critical scrutiny in Saramago's literary and non-literary fictions, such as Os Cadernos de Lanzarote (1994) and A Caverna (2000 - English translation in 2002 - The Cave). In this article, I analyze Saramago's multifaceted perspective on the environmental crisis in his work A Caverna. Firstly, I will show how a central place of the novel, the ironically called “Green Belt”, is in fact a dirty and monotonous area, and eo ipso an oxymoronic expression. Then, I will briefly comment on the denatured configurations of the Housing Centre surrounded by the Green Belt, a space where natural phenomena and processes, such as rain and snow, are only artificially replicated. Next, I examine the significant impact of climate change on the lives of the characters in the novel. Finally, I consider the possibility that the author's opinions about the climate crisis may extend to others of his fictional and non-fictional works.