But unlike other European anti-Zionists, Saramago explicitly connected his dislike of Israel to his feelings about Jews.

In a speech in Brazil on Oct. 13, 2003, Saramago reportedly unburdened himself of this thought about the world's Jews: "Living under the shadows of the Holocaust and expecting to be forgiven for anything they do on behalf of what they have suffered seems abusive to me. They didn't learn anything from the suffering of their parents and grandparents."

It was Judaism itself that Saramago blamed for everything he disliked in Israel. He wrote in the Spanish newspaper El Pais on April 21, 2002:

"[C]ontaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God ... the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: 'Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.'"

A few weeks previous, Saramago had visited Ramallah. The visit occurred shortly after the Passover 2002 suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel that killed 30 people and wounded 140 more. Saramago expressed no grief for these murdered innocents. Instead, he toured areas damaged during fighting between Israeli and Palestinian armed forces and pronounced to a Portuguese radio interviewer: "[I]n Palestine, there is a crime which we can stop. We may compare it with what happened at Auschwitz."

...He was born into a humble rural household in the small village of Azinhaga. The family moved to Lisbon when he was two, and Saramago left school early to contribute to the household bills by working as a mechanic. Gradually, he progressed through numerous jobs towards his central literary interest. He worked as a draughtsman, publisher's reader and freelance translator, and in the editorial and production departments of a publishing house. He also worked on several newspapers, including a stint as a literary reviewer for Serra Nova and, after the death of the dictator António Salazar in 1970, as political commentator on the Diário de Lisboa...

...Political wranglings, and Saramago's own uncompromised and uncompromising communism, were at least partly responsible for his being fired in 1975. The following year, he devoted himself exclusively to his books. "Being fired was the best luck of my life," he said. "It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer."...

Given his late start as a novelist, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the wishes Saramago's last expressed wishes was to pause the world for 50 years. Not, he hastened to add, to win another innings for himself, but for us, collectively, to "find the courage to say that the stage of development we have reached is good enough.

New ways of seeing : 'I don't make excuses for what communist regimes have done. But I have the right to keep my ideas'

Still a Communist party member, Saramago describes himself as a "hormonal communist - just as there's a hormone that makes my beard grow every day. I don't make excuses for what communist regimes have done - the church has done a lot of wrong things, burning people at the stake. But I have the right to keep my ideas. I've found nothing better." Yet he did write in 2003 that, after years of personal friendship with Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader "has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams". In Reis's view, "Saramago lives his communism mostly as a spiritual condition - philosophical and moral. He doesn't preach communism in his novels." His fable of consumerism and control in a globalised culture, The Cave (2001), shows the focus of life shifting from cathedral to shopping mall. But for Jull Costa, its strength is in his "writing so humanely about ordinary people and their predicaments".