José Saramago, Nobel Prize-Winning Portuguese Writer, Dies at 87

The cause was multiple organ failure after a long illness, the José Saramago Foundation said in an announcement on its Web site, josesaramago.org.

A tall, commandingly austere man with a dry, schoolmasterly manner, Mr. Saramago gained international acclaim for novels like “Baltasar and Blimunda” and “Blindness.” (A film adaptation of “Blindness” by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles was released in 2008.)

He was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, and more than two million copies of his books have been sold, his longtime friend and editor, Zeferino Coelho, said.

A novel by Mr. Saramago, “The Elephant’s Journey,” is to be published posthumously in English on Sept. 8 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. In later years he used his stature as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.

To many Americans, Mr. Saramago’s name is associated with a statement he made while touring the West Bank in 2002, when he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.

As a professional novelist, Mr. Saramago was a late bloomer. A first novel, published when he was 23, was followed by 30 years of silence. He became a full-time writer only in his late 50s, after working variously as a garage mechanic, a welfare agency bureaucrat, a printing production manager, a proofreader, a translator and a newspaper columnist.

In 1975, a countercoup overthrew Portugal’s Communist-led revolution of the previous year, and Mr. Saramago was fired as deputy editor of the Lisbon newspaper Diário de Noticias. Overnight, along with other prominent leftists, he became virtually unemployable.

“Being fired was the best luck of my life,” he said in an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 2007. “It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.”

His first major success was the rollicking love story “Baltasar and Blimunda.” Set in 18th-century Portugal, it portrays the misadventures of three eccentrics threatened by the Inquisition: a heretic priest who constructs a flying machine and the two lovers who help him — Baltasar, a one-handed ex-soldier, and Blimunda, a sorceress’s daughter who has X-ray vision.

At one point the couple decides to take refuge for the night in a hayloft. “There is no more satisfying smell than that of turned hay,” Mr. Saramago writes, “of bodies under a blanket, of oxen feeding at the trough, the scent of cold air filtering through the chinks in the hayloft, and perhaps the scent of the moon, for everyone knows that the night assumes a different smell when there is moonlight, and even a blind man, who is incapable of distinguishing night from day, will say, The moon is shining, St. Lucy is believed to have worked this miracle, so it is really only a question of inhaling, Yes, my friends, what a splendid moon this evening.”

The novel, published in an English translation in 1987, won Mr. Saramago a passionate international following. The critic Irving Howe, praising its union of “harsh realism” and “lyric fantasy,” described Mr. Saramago as “a voice of European skepticism, a connoisseur of ironies.”

“I think I hear in his prose echoes of Enlightenment sensibility, caustic and shrewd,” Mr. Howe wrote.

Asked by The New York Times in 2008 to assess Mr. Saramago’s achievement, the critic James Wood wrote: “José Saramago was both an avant-gardist and a traditionalist. His long blocks of unbroken prose, lacking conventional markers like paragraph breaks and quotation marks, could look forbidding and modernist; but his frequent habit of handing over the narration in his novels to a kind of ‘village chorus’ and what seem like peasant simplicities allowed Saramago great flexibility.”