José Saramago - Nobel Lecture

With sleep delayed, night was peopled with the stories and the cases my grandfather told and told: legends, apparitions, terrors, unique episodes, old deaths, scuffles with sticks and stones, the words of our forefathers, an untiring rumour of memories that would keep me awake while at the same time gently lulling me. I could never know if he was silent when he realised that I had fallen asleep or if he kept on talking so as not to leave half-unanswered the question I invariably asked into the most delayed pauses he placed on purpose within the account: “And what happened next?”

José Saramago, in his Nobel Lecture

Nobel Prize in Literature 1998

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1998 was awarded to José Saramago "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality"

www.nobelprize.org