Prize-Winning Prose

Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, whose exuberant imagination and playfulness have made him popular but whose bluntness sometimes can offend, won the 1998 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday. Saramago’s prose is often rooted in recognizable settings but at the same time tinged with magical elements. His first novel, published in 1947 - “Terra do Pecado,” or “Country of Sin” - was a tale of peasants in moral crisis. For the next 18 years, Saramago, a communist who opposed the 41-year conservative dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, worked as a journalist. He returned to fiction only after Salazar’s regime was toppled by a military uprising in 1974.