Jose Saramago, the Portuguese author who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1998, has died at age 87, his publisher said today.

Saramago was known for his looping, surreal style and characters. And his elevation to Nobel prize-winner recalls the political nature of that award. Saramago, a staunch Communist, was cast aside when the political tides changed in Portugal in the mid-1970s -- a move that led to his career as a novelist. As he wrote for his Nobel autobiography: "Unemployed again and bearing in mind the political situation we were undergoing, without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer."

Among the notable works that followed were “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,” "Blindness" and “Baltasar and Blimunda.” But he also thrust himself into political situations occasionally. In 2002, he said an Israeli blockade of Ramallah was "in the spirit of Auschwitz," a statement that infuriated many Jews.

The New York Times' obit included this 2008 assessment from critic James Wood: “Jose Saramago was both an avant-gardist and a traditionalist. His long blocks of unbroken prose, lacking conventional markers like paragraph breaks and quotation marks, could look forbidding and modernist; but his frequent habit of handing over the narration in his novels to a kind of ‘village chorus’ and what seem like peasant simplicities, allowed Saramago great flexibility.”