Nonetheless, for all his pessimism, in Saramago’s most powerful novels there remains a stubborn sprig of utopianism, flickers of “what if?” and “why not?” In “The History of the Siege of Lisbon,” published in 1989, Saramago redevises the past. His hero, Raimundo Silva, is a lonely, impoverished proofreader who, like Melville’s Bartleby, finds himself inexplicably driven to an act of quiet sabotage. Correcting a manuscript on the Reconquista of Lisbon in the 12th century, Silva inserts one word in the text that he imagines will change the course of history. In the original text, an army of crusaders on their way to the Holy Land are asked to join King Alfonso’s attack on Lisbon: after Silva’s amendment, they decide “not” to help. The Iberian Peninsula thus presumably remains Muslim, and the world is spared the Inquisition, as well as the discovery of America.

“The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” published in 1991, is Saramago’s most tetchily subversive work. Saramago is the kind of old-fashioned atheist who is hopping mad at a God who he believes does not exist. His novel’s starting point is the Massacre of the Innocents, when Herod, the Roman king of Judea, learns that the future king of the Jews has just been born in Bethlehem and orders that all the baby boys in that village be slaughtered. In Saramago’s telling, Joseph, husband of Mary, overhears the collective death sentence by chance and manages to hide his own son while leaving the others to perish. It is therefore in atonement for his earthly father’s sin in indirectly colluding with Herod’s iniquity, as well as for God’s in allowing the massacre to occur, that Jesus is later forced to give his life. (The amateur Freudian may wonder if there isn’t an echo here of a Communist son’s guilt at his father’s serving as a policeman under Salazar.) On the cross, Saramago’s Jesus asks humankind to forgive God his sins.

“The Gospel” polarized readers, both in Portugal and abroad, and led to Saramago’s self-imposed symbolic exile in the Canary Islands. The effect on Saramago’s work has been stark. His Canary Island novels are denuded of all the aching particularity, the clamor, reek and clutter of his Portugal works: austere and monitory parables, they often take place in an allegorical urban landscape as stylized as a computer game. In a book like “As Intermitências da Morte,” which will be published in the United States in the spring, his subject is nothing less than the folly of man’s search for eternal life.

To some observers, Saramago’s exile has made him less relevant than other contemporary Portuguese greats like Antonio Lobo Antunes, who, using the polyphonic techniques of high modernism, continues to explore the psychic wounds left by Portugal’s recent political history. To others, Saramago has taken on the role of a more universal conscience, giving his literary fables about the failures of democracy or the tyranny of corporations a broader reach.

For the director Fernando Meirelles, who is making the film of “Blindness,” this universalism was the great achievement of that work. “It’s an allegory about the fragility of civilization,” Meirelles told me. “Ten years ago, I wanted to make my first feature film from the book — I was attracted by the paradox of making something visual about sightlessness — but Saramago said no. Whoopi Goldberg and Gael García Bernal both tried to buy the rights; he refused. Finally, my producer and screenwriter came to the Canary Islands and spent two days with Saramago and talked him into it.”

Saramago acknowledged to me that many people approached him about filming “Blindness.” “I always resisted,” he said, “because it’s a violent book about social degradation, rape, and I didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”

Today saramago is planning his next novel. “Maybe it’s my last book,” he ventured during our conversation in Lisbon. “When I finish a book, I wait for the next idea, and sometimes it takes a long time, and I get worried. When I finished ‘Pequenas Memórias,’ I wondered if the cycle was now complete. I had for the first time in my life a sense of finitude, and it was not a pleasant feeling. Everything seemed little, insignificant. I’m 84. I could live perhaps another three, four years. The worst that death has is that you were here, and now you’re not.”