Portuguese "street Art" has taken the Nobel prize winning novelist Saramago "out" into the streets of Lisbon by having him and his wife Pilar painted on the walls of an old house down town ...
I had been wanting to photograph it for weeks, though I was not carrying my camera everytime I drove by ... so Saturday morning I just took to the streets of down town to do it.
"We always get to where we are being waited at" (Left). "One had rather behave foolishly but move forward than not move at all" (Right).I must confess I didn't read all of his books and certainly not the ones he seems to have been highly praised for ... though from a first experience of giving voice to an extract of Baltasar and Blimunda (1982) for a film back in the nineties, whose difficult and long prose almost left me out of breath, I went onto reading the Manual of painting and caligraphy (1997), All the names (1997), Journey to Portugal (1981), The tale of the unknown island (1997), Memories of my youth (2006), Death with interruptions (2005) and The elephant's journey (2008), with All the names being my favourite and Memories of my youth having provided me an insight into his life.
I have often bought his translated books in French to offer and those who got to "know" him were all tempted to further continue reading him, not simply because he had been a Nobel laureate.
Whether this paintings bring the attention he deserves it's controversial ... maybe as controversial as his career seems to have been (irrespective of the winning prize) ...
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