Extracting quotes from History : the revolutionary narratives of José Saramago and Gabriel García Márquez

Abstract

José Saramago wrote about his amazement while reading Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and there is an important dialogue between this book and Raised from the Ground. Even though the two novels contrast in their denouements, they are similar from the point of view of theme and narrative strategy. Taking into account other studies on these novels and emphasizing their re-enactment of tragic historical episodes, this paper intends to resume and analyze some of the main aspects of the dialogue between Saramago and García Márquez, in order to show that it is not restricted to the Colombian writer's most famous novel nor to the so-called magic realism. The primary focus will therefore be a comparative analysis of the career path and revolutionary nature of the work of two authors with various affinities, who saw themselves as peers and who expressed their mutual admiration for each other's creations.

Keywords

• José Saramago
• Gabriel García Márquez
• comparative literature
• History