How European is it?: Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon

How European 20th-century novel is it? Most writers embarking on a piece of historical fiction - say, a  novel entitled The History of the Siege of Lisbon, which is about that event when, apparently, Christian forces ousted the Muslims from Lisbon and took control of the city, thereby, one might argue, changing the course of world history? (without this event, no Prince Henry the Navigator, Muslims get a solid foothold in Europe, maybe become the dominant religious bloc on the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere) - would choose a central character from whose point of view to convey the story, someone such as an invading general, or a defending soldier, or a leading politician or cleric, or even a bit player in the event who can give a unique and impartial perspective - but Jose Saramago makes his central character the proof-reader hired to read the final manuscript copy of a novel call The History of the Siege of Lisbon - so you can just imaging the post-modern and Borgesian (I know, he's not European) possibilities. Saramago's main character, Raimundo, goes over the manuscript of this critical event and finds mistakes and solecisms and anachronisms: the use of crescent flag, which had not at that time been adopted by the Muslim nations, for example, or getting lost in a correction about how a certain type of slingshot developed its name. It's a real case of telling a story by indirection, and of having fiction focus so much on its own self and mechanisms that fiction itself begins to seem like fact. I wouldn't have thought this would be a smart way to tell a story, and to be honest this novel hardly moves like the wind, but it comes w/ high praise from b-in-law J, who rarely if ever praises, or even reads, novels, and it's kind of intriguing so far - onl 30+ pages or so - not to mention Saramago's Nobel (a blessing, or a curse?), so I'll see how far he can go with this odd conceit, or maybe how far I can go.