In October 1998 José Saramago became the first writer of the Portuguese-speaking world to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy's citation for Saramago called his novels "parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony," an apt characterization of the universal significance of the writer's work. In 1997 the writer Edmund White had already declared that no candidate for the Nobel Prize had a better claim to lasting recognition as a novelist than Saramago. Although Saramago's first novel, Terra do pecado (Land of Sin), appeared in print in 1947, he did not begin to receive national and international acclaim for his work until he was almost sixty years old. His rise to the top of the literary establishment was meteoric. Indeed, during the 1980s and 1990s no other Portuguese writer attained greater national and international recognition, a fact substantiated by the many prestigious awards that Saramago has received both...