Café readers, Blindness, Saramago
It's café readers tomorrow and I am putting off finishing the book.
It's Blindness, by José Saramago, translated, I think, from the Portuguese. It's written without paragraphs or any indication of speech or even who's speaking, usually. Long sentences that just run on and on.
Funnily enough, the quirks of style have been OK. After a while you don't notice it.
What you do notice is the DEPRESSING story. It's kind of "Lord of the Flies" on steroids.
Saramago is a Nobel laureate and Blindness is among his greatest works. Here's what he said about it in his acceptance speech :
Accepting his Nobel prize, Saramago, calling himself "the apprentice", said: "The apprentice thought, 'we are blind', and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures."
Man. I haven't felt this fed up from reading a book since the great Thomas Hardy debacle when I read Tess of the Durbervilles closely followed by Jude the Obscure and cried all night. (I was young). Or the dire Northern Lights crisis, when I read Philip Pullman's bleak children's trilogy and went mentally numb for three whole days.
Never mind. Lunchtime tomorrow it will all be over.
I wonder what next month's book is. Just as long as it isn't about fascism or some other dystopia.
It's Blindness, by José Saramago, translated, I think, from the Portuguese. It's written without paragraphs or any indication of speech or even who's speaking, usually. Long sentences that just run on and on.
Funnily enough, the quirks of style have been OK. After a while you don't notice it.
What you do notice is the DEPRESSING story. It's kind of "Lord of the Flies" on steroids.
Saramago is a Nobel laureate and Blindness is among his greatest works. Here's what he said about it in his acceptance speech :
Accepting his Nobel prize, Saramago, calling himself "the apprentice", said: "The apprentice thought, 'we are blind', and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures."
Man. I haven't felt this fed up from reading a book since the great Thomas Hardy debacle when I read Tess of the Durbervilles closely followed by Jude the Obscure and cried all night. (I was young). Or the dire Northern Lights crisis, when I read Philip Pullman's bleak children's trilogy and went mentally numb for three whole days.
Never mind. Lunchtime tomorrow it will all be over.
I wonder what next month's book is. Just as long as it isn't about fascism or some other dystopia.
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