On the one hand, Mr. Wood wrote, it allowed the writer to “revel in sheer storytelling,” and on the other to “undermine, ironically, the very ‘truths’ and simplicities his apparently unsophisticated narrators traded in.”

Paradox was Mr. Saramago’s stock in trade. A militant atheist who maintained that human history would have been a lot more peaceful if it weren’t for religion, his novels are still preoccupied with the question of God.

His novel “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” in which Jesus on the cross apologizes to mankind for God’s sins, was deemed blasphemous by some believers and deeply religious by others. When the Portuguese government, under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church, blocked its entry for a European Literary Prize in 1992, Mr. Saramago chose to go into exile in the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession.

Mr. Saramago’s hardscrabble origins did not seem to predestine him for a life of letters. Born in 1922 in the village of Azinhaga, 60 miles northeast of Lisbon, he was largely raised by his maternal grandparents while his parents sought work in the big city.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Mr. Saramago spoke admiringly of these grandparents, illiterate peasants who, in the winter, slept in the same bed as their piglets yet who imparted to him a taste for fantasy and folklore as well as a respect for nature.

One of Mr. Saramago’s last books, and one of his most touching, was a childhood memoir titled “Small Memories.” In it, he recounts the trauma of being transplanted from his grandparents’ rural shack to Lisbon, where his father had joined the police force. Several months later, Francisco, his older brother and only sibling, died of pneumonia.

Mr. Saramago loved to tell a story of how he came by his surname. His real family name was de Sousa. But when, as a 7-year-old boy, he showed up for his first day of school and presented his birth certificate, it was discovered that the clerk in his home village had registered him as José Saramago. “Saramago,” which means “wild radish,” a green that country people were obliged to eat in hard times, was the insulting nickname by which the novelist’s father was known.