This allegorical novel takes its title from Plato's cave, where shadows constitute reality for those imprisoned within. Saramago sets his story in an immense office building, shopping mall and condominium called the Center, where his characters sacrifice their values and humanity to the caprices of market economics. ''His target is not simply the apparent aim of global capitalism to shape communities into homogenized . . . units,'' Jonathan Keates wrote in the New York Times in 2002. ''The book turns its heat equally on our willingness to collude with this reductive tyranny.''
Jose Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922. His plays, poetry, memoirs, and novels have been translated into more than 20 languages. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.
