Jose Saramago

Portuguese fabulist Jose Saramago, whose entrancing tales and playful skepticism about history and reality make him one of Europe's most original contemporary writers, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature Thursday. The 75-year-old author rose from obscurity late in life to become the grand old man of Portuguese letters. Saramago is the first author writing in Portuguese, the language of 140 million people in countries around the world once under Lisbon's dominion, to win the prize.

At the start of "The Stone Raft," a river that flows from France into Spain disappears into the ground. Soon a rift appears, bisecting the Pyrenees lengthwise; in a day or two the rift is 30 feet wide. The entire Iberian Peninsula has broken off from Europe and begun to head west across the Atlantic; slowly, at first, and then at a rate of some 30 miles a day.

The circumstantial fog that surrounds so many modern facts, the literary fog with which some modern authors choose to write about them, the actual fog that blurs and softens the Baroque architecture of Lisbon: How well, on the whole, these come together in "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis." The Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, author of the enchanting historical fantasy "Baltasar and Blimunda," has created an utterly indeterminate protagonist.