In September 2008, at the age of eighty-five, José Saramago was feeling restless. “Here’s a job for you”, said his wife. “Write a blog”. And so the 1998 Nobel laureate began to record his reflections on an almost daily basis, jubilantly freed from the constraints of fiction and awed by the “infinite page” of the internet: “that place where I can most express myself according to my desires”. So close has this blog since become to Saramago’s heart that a review of it in a Portuguese newspaper caused him to break a vow, “which hitherto I have fulfilled to the letter – never to respond to, or even comment on, any criticism of my work”. The reviewer had remarked on Saramago’s “excesses of indignation”. The blogger was outraged: “How can one talk of excesses of indignation in a country where it is specifically lacking?”
