José Saramago: As crónicas políticas

Always involved with the major issues of his time, Saramago offers us, in his political chronicles, a broad vision of the events that shaped Portuguese and European reality in two sequential but distinct moments: from 1968 until the Revolution of 25 April 1974 and in the revolutionary period after the Revolution until 1975. The political chronicles of the period preceding the Revolution reveal life under the dictatorship of Marcello Caetano, a phase in which the dictator sought to create the image of greater openness to individual freedoms, yet censorship continued to exert a controlling force. The political chronicles of the turbulent period that followed the Revolution initially present an optimism about the overthrow of the fascist government. Also, the hope for the creation of a socialist government, but end in a certain dystopia, when the author sees the revolutionary ideals in crisis.