For a fiction writer, there is no higher honor than the Nobel Prize for Literature. The award brings with it a discernible amount of respect and creative validation, and it attracts considerable attention. That said, last year's Nobel Laureate José Saramago has written what appears to be the slightest work by an acclaimed writer in a long time. The Tale Of The Unknown Island is an illustrated, pocket-sized, 50-page fable that at first seems better suited to children than adults. Yet there's no confusing Saramago's tangled prose (translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa) with kiddie lit. His sentences are nearly stream-of-conscious statements, a rush of compressed conversations tenuously tied together by commas and frequently lacking proper names. Saramago's writing spills over each tiny page with nary a spacious pause, lending the story a dreamlike quality. The Tale Of The Unknown Island resembles but carefully alters the rhythm and pacing of an epic poem, seeming closer in tone to a Biblical parable: Though the plot is simple enough, the story is rife with philosophical implications. An unnamed man makes a request for a boat from a reclusive king so that he might set out in search of an undiscovered island. Even though everyone the man meets insists that there are no new islands left, he insists on the validity of his quest. With a crew made up of reluctant sailors and a cleaning woman from the king's castle, the man ventures off in search of this island, but the voyage quickly attains an abstract quality flavored with magic realism. At just 50 pages, interrupted with vaguely related pictures by Peter Sís, Saramago's book coasts along briskly, yet the tone lingers even after the story is finished. Though not a major work, The Tale Of The Unknown Island shows how even a small fantasy can hint at the metaphysical meanings generally reserved for giant tomes.