As it happens, I was reading the advance edition of José Saramago’s latest novel when news arrived this morning of his death at age 87.

The book, “The Elephant’s Journey,” is a wry historical novel about an animal keeper and the true-life trip he made across Reformation-era Europe with (among others) Archduke Maximilian II and his pet elephant. It will be published in early September.

If it struck me as slightly surreal to read Saramago’s obituary on the same day I was reading his new novel, that’s mainly because, reading Saramago, everything seems slightly surreal. But it’s also because “The Elephant’s Journey” is such a lively book: Saramago may have known he was dying, but as he signaled clearly in his previous novel, “Death With Interruptions” (in which everybody stops dying for a time), he wasn’t particularly interested in the woe-is-me intimations of mortality that haunt some late-career writers. In the words of Drenka Willen, Saramago’s longtime editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, “The Elephant’s Journey” is a “celebration of life in the best possible sense.”

I immediately started looking for a quotation from the new book that I could post as a tribute, but nothing seemed quite right until I landed on Saramago’s dedication to his wife, which under the circumstances is especially powerful and sad: “To Pilar,” he wrote, “who wouldn’t let me die.”