Jose Saramago in the Times Magazine

Fernanda Eberstadt has a lengthly profile of Jose Saramago in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine.

Not a lot about his fiction in this piece, but it does present a charming look at the octogenarian Nobel Prize winner, who, apparently, isn’t all that popular:

Yet Saramago also often appears to be disliked. In part this is the resentment of a country that has long been dominated by a small elite. In part, it is a matter of Saramago’s own unaccommodating personality. Everywhere I went in Lisbon in June, people described him as “cold,” “arrogant,” “unsympathetic.” When my interpreter inquired at a DVD store if a documentary about Saramago was in stock, the young salesman, startled by the request, replied, laughing, “I hope not!”