They too failed to trace any evidence.The Town Hall inadvertently supplied only his own records, eerily implying that Jose had substituted for the missing Francisco. He gleans only her name; address; place and date of birth; and the fact that she is divorced. We are drawn into his hermetic pursuit of a woman so real in his mind that he can stalk her on the streets.It’s a story of obsession that had its brief parallel in the life of Jose the author. Saramago never forgot the mourning into which his family was plunged when his older brother, Francisco, died suddenly aged four.

Saramago was only two at the time, and over 70 years passed before he decided to investigate the death He wrote to the City of Lisbon, who had no record. Always an avid collector of cuttings about the rich and famous, he starts entering the Registry at night. He intends to add to the “official version” by compiling his own collection of Registry data: the actual number of celebrities’ divorces, offspring and the rest.By chance, he accesses the files of an unknown woman. Here he chooses a protagonist in search of a character of whom he at first knows no more than a name.Jose is a humble clerk in the Registry of Births and Deaths. It is his task to compile dossiers on the living and the dead. His responsibility for “all the names” gives him illusions of grandeur almost akin to an author’s; and his moment of triumph lies in being permitted to reunite the living and the dead through their files.Jose’s quest begins when he determines to make use of the fact that the door to his house opens into the archives. After his millennial parable Essay on Blindness (Saramago insists on the Portuguese title, which in English lost its first two words, since “I am really just an essayist who happens to write essays the length of novels”), he has opted for a radical departure.

“I no longer experience hunger but I can still feel the hunger of my fellow man… Already there are 1.5 bn people in the world living on under a dollar a day. That’s a form of cruelty that demands we invert our priorities.” If evil is aligned with exploitation and poverty, then it follows that “we have to redefine our priorities and accord a minimum standard of living to all”.His latest novel All the Names (translated by Margaret Jull Costa; Harvill, pounds 10.99) is a different search for authenticity. Needless to say, sanctimonious justifications do not provide an answer, and the problem persists.

It is one Saramago has continued to raise on every occasion where his acceptance of the pounds 600,000 award is discussed. He does so again, not only during our interview but during a talk to a packed, mainly Latin American audience in London.”There is nothing pious about it,” he explains. A former culture minister denounced Saramago’s The Gospel according to Jesus Christ as “anti-Portuguese” for its representation of popular faith. The irony was that allowing Jesus a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, as it did, was probably the least novel ingredient in a book crammed with philosophical extemporising.In particular, there is the resounding final argument between the all- too-human Christ and the less-than-divine God concerning the Problem of Evil. “I was not awarded the Prize for my communism but for my books. And no one ever asks if another author is accepting the Prize in the name of capitalism.”It’s not a distinction that either the Pope or the Portuguese Ministry of Culture has been inclined to endorse. The Vatican deplored yet another “inveterate communist with anti-religious views” receiving the plaudit, after Italian playwright Dario Fo.

The Nobel Prize is a form of respect for men like him, and for writers of humble origin like me.”Any reference to the notion that Saramago might have followed the example of Jean-Paul Sartre (fellow Communist Party nominee with proletarian sympathies) and turn down the Nobel is met with crisp rejection. Quite literally: I come from a peasant family and when the time came for my uncle to die, he sat down among his fruit trees and wept to bid them farewell. He mentions the Brazilians Drummond de Andrade and Jorge Amado, in a list of Portuguese authors with Miguel Torga and Melo Neto at the top.
Perhaps more surprisingly, he goes on to include his own ancestors “Being at the age I am, I feel very close to my roots. That is why it is entirely pointless for there to be envy between writers.” So what of the unseemly jostling from some of his Portuguese countrymen after the award of the Nobel Prize last autumn? Saramago would prefer to see things the other way about, and extend the accolade to his fellow Portuguese-language writers. “If you don’t write your books, nobody else will do it for you,” he says “No one else has lived your life. He plays with history and geography, creating legends and fables that are very much for our world and our time. He has pursued it across the media – writing drama and poetry, travel and essays, but above all in his journalism and novels – and across an extraordinary imaginative and political range.