Looking back on his life from the outpost of his 76 years, Jose Saramago still finds it hard to believe that on Dec. 10 in Stockholm he will become the first Portuguese-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not that he was a surprise choice: he was already the pundits' favorite last year when the prize went to Dario Fo of Italy. It is just that, as he puts it softly, ''I was not born for this.''

The son of a peasant father and an illiterate mother, brought up in a home with no books, he took almost 40 years to go from metalworker to civil servant to editor in a publishing house to newspaper editor. The accident of unemployment in his mid-50's finally led him to risk life as a full-time writer. And he was 60 before he earned recognition at home and abroad with ''Baltasar and Blimunda.''

Still, if the tall, slim, bespectacled Portuguese likes to remind people that he ''was not born for this,'' it is not only out of bemusement at his late-in-life success. It is also to explain that his distinctive narrative style, his ironic voice, his unrestrained imagination and the allegorical themes of his books are all products of his life before he became a writer. ''I think it simply has to do with my past,'' he said.

That this past is also deeply rooted in the history and literature of what was long one of Europe's poorest and most isolated countries may well have narrowed his focus, but Mr. Saramago feels this has worked in his favor. ''I believe that the more authentic the expression of the cultural roots of an author, the more understandable it is to people from other cultures,'' he said.

And yet, while profoundly Portuguese, Mr. Saramago remains an outsider: an atheist and a Communist in a Roman Catholic and conservative land.

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In 1992 a center-right Portuguese Government even vetoed his novel ''The Gospel According to Jesus Christ'' on the ground of blasphemy. Furious, he left Lisbon and moved to this volcanic Spanish island off the west coast of Africa with his wife, Pilar del Rio, a Spanish journalist.

After his Nobel Prize was announced in October, it was the Vatican's turn to lament that for the second year running the award had gone to someone it perceives to be anti-religious. ''Why does the Vatican get involved in these things?'' Mr. Saramago asked, uncharacteristically raising his voice. ''Why doesn't it keep itself busy with prayers? Why doesn't it instead open its cupboards and reveal the skeletons it has inside?''

But in Portugal, where walls were plastered with posters proclaiming ''Congratulations, Jose Saramago,'' he was now received like a prodigal son. ''The prize became a national happening,'' he said. ''People came up to me, not to congratulate me -- that would be normal -- but to say, 'Thank you, thank you,' as if the Nobel Prize were a sort of recognition for all my countrymen, as if everyone had grown one inch taller.''

The prize abruptly ended Mr. Saramago's tranquillity, assaulting him with the vagaries of sudden fame, a topic he treats mockingly in his latest novel, ''Todos os Nomes,'' or ''All the Names,'' still to be published in English. But the flurry of recent weeks has also led him to reflect on his life, to rummage in his past for the incidents and influences that explain why, what and how he writes.

Two childhood memories stand out. Although his parents moved to Lisbon in 1924, when he was 2, he always spent vacations with his grandparents in his birthplace in the village of Azinhaga in the Ribatejo region. They bred pigs and, in the winter, he recalled, they would take weak piglets to their bed.

''So we can imagine the two oldies, covered with blankets, in a cold house, freezing outside, and between them, like their own children, two or three piglets, being heated by human warmth,'' he said, slipping into storytelling mode. ''Of course, they would be killed later. Life was like that.''

Years later, he said, his grandfather suffered a stroke and was to be taken to Lisbon for treatment. ''He went into the yard of his house, where there were a few trees, fig trees, olive trees,'' Mr. Saramago said, ''and he went one by one, embracing the trees and crying, saying goodbye to them because he knew he would not return. To see this, to live this, if that doesn't mark you for the rest of your life, you have no feeling.''

At primary school, young Jose loved reading and writing but, with no money for further studies, at 12 he entered an industrial college to learn the trade of metalworker. To his delight, the school also offered a course in literature.

By the time he began work as a metalworker at 17, he was dreaming of becoming a writer. He switched jobs to become a clerk in a hospital and began spending evenings in a local library. ''When I was 25, I wrote a novel, 'Land of Sin,' and amazingly it was published,'' he said, ''although it went unnoticed.''

But after he sent a second novel to a publisher and it never returned, he stopped writing. ''I don't think I was conscious of this at the time, but looking back, I think I reached the conclusion that I had nothing important to say,'' he mused, ''so I went 20 years, from 1947 to 1966, without publishing a word. I had no regrets. I wasn't even collecting experiences to recount later. My writing period was over. I just lived my life.''

A Political Defeat Leads To a Career as a Writer

In the 1960's, while working for a Lisbon publisher, he published two books of poems, but nothing more ambitious. At the time, Portugal was ruled by a rightist dictatorship that had been in power since 1926, but this did not explain Mr. Saramago's silence. ''I was not a victim of fascist oppression,'' he said. ''There were great writers who continued to write against all odds. I took no risks because I had nothing to say.''

At least not in a literary sense. Having joined the Communist Party in 1969, he began writing editorials in a Lisbon newspaper, struggling daily with official censors. After the April 1974 revolution toppled the regime, he became deputy editor of a newly nationalized Communist-dominated newspaper, Diario de Noticias, until he was thrown out of his job by an anti-Communist counteroffensive in November 1975.

''I can probably thank this for the fact I became a writer,'' he said. ''Finding myself out of work, defeated politically, I decided the time had come to determine if I really was a writer. I felt I had something to say, but I didn't know what. In 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy,' published in 1977, about a painter who writes to reflect on how badly he paints, I indirectly pose the basic question: 'Now, Jose, what are you going to write?' ''

In his next book, ''Raised From the Floor,'' a neo-realistic story of oppressed peasants struggling for land, he addressed what would prove to be an equally important question: how was he going to write? ''I did the research in the Alentejo; then for three years I couldn't write it,'' he said. ''Finally I began, but it still wasn't right. Then, around page 23 or 24, without even thinking about it, I began to write in the way that became my particular style of narrating.''

Unusual Punctuation And Leaps in Time

Not only does this dispense with orthodox punctuation, like question marks or quotation marks for dialogue, but also it hops between past and present tenses. ''I later understood why this happened,'' Mr. Saramago said. ''I had been listening to the stories of peasants who could not read or write, so I said to myself, Tell them the stories they had told me. That's how I found the voice of the narrator. And I didn't need punctuation because that's not how we talk.''

In his breakthrough novel, ''Baltasar and Blimunda,'' this technique enabled him to tell a story set in the early 18th century -- about an eccentric priest, a one-armed army veteran and a mystical woman and their attempts to fly -- as a story being recounted today. Similarly, the narrator in ''The Gospel According to Jesus Christ'' offers his version of Jesus' life, but also refers to what has happened to Christianity since then.

Links Between Things That Happen Far Apart

''People who say I write historical novels are totally wrong,'' he said. ''They are novels that deal with things that happened, but it's the same to me if they happened yesterday or 2,000 years ago. I see time as an enormous cloth where everything that happens is projected in a chaotic manner. It is the writer's job to find the line that links things that happen at different times and facts that appear to have nothing to do with each other.''

In ''The History of the Siege of Lisbon,'' in which a proofreader tries to change history by adding the word ''not'' to a description of crucial events 850 years earlier, the novelist reflects further on time. ''History is not a science, but a reading of facts that can be interpreted a thousand ways,'' he said. ''Think how often history has been rewritten to suit political or ideological circumstances.''

Some ideas for books simply come out of the blue. For example, ''Blindness,'' published to acclaim in the United States this fall by Harcourt Brace, which has brought out most of his books in English, was born while he was waiting to be served in a restaurant. ''The question suddenly came into my head, 'And if we were all blind?' '' he recalled. ''And then immediately, as if answering myself, 'But we are all blind.' '' And from this came his allegorical account of a city swept by an epidemic of sudden blindness.

Perhaps most intriguing is this atheist writer's fascination with religion. In ''The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,'' it is apparent that he knows his Bible, and he treats the figure of Jesus with compassion, as a victim of a power struggle between God and the Devil. But his underlying message is that religion has turned man against man in wars, massacres, exterminations, autos-da-fe and the like, ''all in the name of God.''

Interested in Themes That 'Concern Everyone'

Today, with his books translated into 25 languages, the international appeal of his fiction is no longer a mystery. ''The themes that interest me are questions that I think concern everyone,'' he said. ''I'm thinking of my own relationship with the world, with society, with time, with history. There is also a way of narrating, a greater or lesser degree of emotion, an ironic look at powerful institutions, perhaps all of this.''

''But in the end,'' he went on, ''I could only be a Portuguese writer. Some people need to make references, like the 'Garcia Marquez of Europe,' but I don't think this is the case. There are many differences between us, all of them favoring Garcia Marquez. But I believe my work is a direct product of my imagination, my concerns. I have always lived in isolation. I read everything, but my roots are Portuguese.''

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