Portuguese Author Wins Nobel Prize

Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago was named the winner of the 1998 Nobel Literature Prize Thursday.

In its citation, the Swedish Academy said it gave the award to Saramago for work that "with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us to apprehend an illusory reality."

Since the 1980s, Saramago has been one of Portugal's best-selling contemporary writers and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages.

But he has never courted the kind of fame offered by literary prizes, and his bluntness can sometimes offend.

"I am skeptical, reserved, I don't gush, I don't go around smiling, hugging people, and trying to make friends," he once said.

At 75, he remains an outspoken nonconformist through his regular newspaper and radio commentaries, though his views are always inspired by his deep concern for his fellow man.

Blindness, his most recent book to be translated into English, is an unsettling allegory about the social meltdown as an inexplicable blindness sweeps through society.

"This blindness isn't a real blindness; it's a blindness of rationality," he said. "We're rational beings, but we don't behave rationally. If we did, there'd be no starvation in the world."

Saramago wrote his breakthrough novel in 1982, Baltasar and Blimunda. Perhaps his best-known work is The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from Europe for supernatural reasons and floats off into the Atlantic.

That device allows him to comment ironically "about the authorities and politicians, perhaps especially about the major players in power politics."

Saramago is the fourth consecutive European to win the prestigious prize. Anxiety about the skewing of priorities in modern society is evident in all his works and also gives a clue to his resolute sympathy toward the Communist Party.

Born Nov. 16, 1922, in the town of Azinhaga near Lisbon, Saramago was raised in the capital. From a poor family, he never finished university but continued to study part-time while supporting himself as a metalworker.

His first novel published in 1947, Terra do Pecado, or Country of Sin, was a tale of peasants in moral crisis. It sold badly but won Saramago enough recognition to allow him jump from the welder's shop to a job on a literary magazine.

But for the next 18 years Saramago, then a committed communist who opposed the 41-year rightist dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, published only a few travel and poetry books while he worked as a journalist.

He returned to fiction only after Salazar's regime was toppled by a military uprising in 1974.