The Portuguese writer who won the Noble Prize in Literature is dead. Here are a few relevant facts about his legacy, courtesy of the NYT obituary:

Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. … To many Americans, Mr. Saramago’s name is associated with a statement he made while touring the West Bank in 2002, when he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.

So this is the kind of guy they dig in European literary circles. By the way, isn’t Times’ choice of words curious? “To many Americans…” I guess we’re to believe that Europeans don’t much care or take note when their intellectuals liken modern-day Israelis to the Nazis.