Blindness (Movie Tie-In)

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• ISBN13: 9780156035583
• Outfit: New

Description

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In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.

In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.

Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.

And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber

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Customer Reviews

Reading with Tequila
I saw and loved the movie Blindness before even realizing it was based on a book. It's an amazing story. While the movie lacked the depth of the book, I think the movie was easier to understand and get into. My problem with the book stems from the writing style. The book is a collection of run-on sentences filled with commas. There isn't a quotation mark to be found. Most correct punctuation rules are completely disregarded. I found it very difficult to tell who was speaking, which wasn't helped in the least by the lack of names. The blind need no names, the book claims. Characters are defined by a distinguishing characteristic - the doctor, the first blind man, the boy with the squint, etc.

The story is self-explanatory. The city goes blind. Mayhem ensues. While seemingly basic, the way the story unfolds in truly terrifying. The blindness isn't the enemy. The other people are. When put into a this type of situation, people's true (and often horrific) colors show. Saramago goes beyond surface concerns and manages to get at the core of the issue. He throws every horrendous possibility at his characters, making them truly earn their survival.

Blindness offers one of the strongest female characters I've ever encountered - the doctor's wife. This book deals with the very worst of mankind's treatment of one another. The things she witnesses and experiences would break anyone and yet, this unnamed women is inspirational in her ability to carry on.

As a modern American reader, I found myself asking the obvious questions. Why weren't the soldiers wearing bio hazard suits? Why wasn't the government working on a cure as opposed to this poor attempt at quarantine? Things of that nature.

Very few books could survive this type of formatting nightmare, but the story manages to shine through the mess. Blindness is an amazing tale of surviving when all hope is lost.

2010-08-30 (New Jersey, USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Blindness by Jose Saramago
The stoplight turns green. It is at this moment, replicated throughout the world and symbolic of man's universally subconscious desire for movement, that movement begins to cease as an everyman becomes inexplicably blind. The phenomena is at first local, spreading through a handful of people with the slightest contact. The government picks up on this and places them in a hurried quarantine, but this doesn't do the slightest to staunch the epidemic and soon everyone throughout the world is struck blind, save a kindly doctor's wife who leads her group through the inhumanity of the quarantine and into society of their own.

The book excels in its bleakness, its stark depiction of man's essential character, its detached tone as it describes the most brutal of circumstances, and in its ultimate salvation. There is a light (no pun intended) at the end of this tunnel, but in order to get there the reader has to face countless times Saramago's view that modern man's id is inherently primitive, which isn't necessarily innovative but comprehensible here due to the book's beautiful sense of nuance and in the myriad of moments of grace that suspend its funereal tone. Ultimately it is one long, phantasmagorical allegory on man's vices and inabilities, and for the skill in which Saramago translates that to the reader the book alone is a triumph. I don't think I'm going to hurry to re-read it anytime soon, though.

2010-07-26 | scott89119 (Whittier, CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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The Beauty in Blindness: A Story of Human Struggle
If you took away everything--your career, your possessions, your loved ones, and even your sense of being in the world--what is left?
The answer is chaos. Stripped to the bare bones of life, the characters in this book prove to you what it means to be human.
What a beautiful, masterful book. No wonder Saramago has been so highly praised; he more than deserves it.
As a side note, if possible, buy the original version, without the movie tie-in...who needs preconceived information about the characters before you even meet them? Let your mind create them using the guidelines given in the book. :)

2010-07-16 (Massachusetts) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Blindness
The premise of this book was amazingly done. Jose Saramago's blindness is about an unknown city where one day, someone suddenly goes blind.

Its not the normal blindness however, he sees only a milky white. And soon it is found that it is contagious. In the beginning days the people going blind are rounded up and put into an old insane asylum in hopes that the contagion will not spread. There they become the nameless, only known by what they once were like a taxi driver, or a girl with dark glasses.

While there, only one person, an Opthamalogist's wife, still retains the ability to see. She pretends to be blind to stay with her husband and as the asylum gets fuller she helps those in her area. The biggest fear is the guards outside who prevent anyone from leaving, by force if necessary.

Another obstacle is a blind man with a gun and the members of his ward. Holding hostage the food, he demands valuables, and eventually women in exchange for not starving. Even the seeing woman must bow to his wishes so that he does not shoot anyone. The scenes in this area of the book are very graphic. There is no hesitation in describing bodily functions, rape, and violence.

Trying to survive the worse extremes and filth, the group in the Doctor's wife's ward stick together until then end. A fire at the asylum allows everyone to leave, but the world they return to is not the world they left. Most everyone around is blind and with no running water or electricity, the streets are filthy and full of excrement. People rove around searching for food and attacking those who might even have a small piece of moldy bread.

It is up to the one seeing person to lead her group to safety and try to ensure that they don't all die of disease or starvation.

While I loved the idea of this book, I was very turned off by the writing. I've seen it described that reading his writing was very much like being blind and trying to see. That he was trying to bring you in to the blind person's world, and for that he won a Nobel prize. My thought is that his writing is very much like an artist creating a masterpiece, and then covering it with a sheet in the exhibition. While it might be clever to do something like that, what is the world missing by not being able to see the true work of art? I found myself skimming several lines at a time just because of the lack of breaks and paragraphs. I could handle the different people all talking at once with no designators for the most part, but the lack of paragraphs killed this book for me.

Overall I'd say that this book was just average for me. I would have enjoyed it a great deal more if it were easier to read. Wonderful idea, not so wonderful execution.

Blindness
Copyright 1995
293 pages

2010-06-05 | kairosdreaming (Montana) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Eat the weak
More about the author's interpretation of human nature than an actual plot about losing vision. "This is the stuff we're made of, half indifference and half malice." (p. 32)
In the plotline, domesticated animals apparently did not lose their sight, although they were quickly forced into a feral lifestyle. But, with the exception of the doctor's wife, the entire ebb and flow of a benign organized society descended into scatological foraging, a chaos in which a few members seized whatever advantage they could over the rest for survive and to satisfy their baser desires. The end of public utilities brought the scatological theme to a crescendo. Yuck!
I still ponder the conscience of the doctor's wife who could not bring herself to kill more of the bad boys, take their gun, and share the food more equitably. Instead, her conscience brought about a conflagration which killed many more good and evil alike.
Even the doctor's wife's altruistic efforts to feed her small group brought about more death and destruction.
Frankly, I found the dog of tears to be the most sympathetic character.
My attorney said it all turns out okay in the end, but in reality the total breakdown of an effective government, destruction of the food delivery system, disruption of public utilities, and the deaths in the various strata of society, could spell a likely outbreak of violent anarchy.
Oh, well...Maybe it does turn out alright. We'll just have to read "Seeing," the apparent sequel, to find out.

2010-05-09 | cecilkunkle (On the banks of the Wabash far away) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780156001410
• Health circumstances: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Courage, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and aid to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

This is a skeptic’s journey into the meaning of God and of human existence. At once an ironic rendering of the life of Christ and a beautiful novel, Saramago’s tale has sparked intense discussion about the meaning of Christianity and the Church as an institution. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

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Customer Reviews

Father Figures
IGNORE THE MISATTRIBUTION ABOVE; THIS IS A BOOK BY JOSE SARAMAGO!

Sons look up to their fathers and try to emulate them. They also defy them, striking out on their own, or attempting to do so. Why should this be any different in the case of the young Jesus Christ? This amazing novel by Nobel prizewinner José Saramago asks just this question, concentrating on a time-frame largely passed over in the Bible, the adolescence and young manhood of Jesus, although several familiar events occur out of their gospel sequence.

There is something compelling about reading a story whose general outlines are well known but whose details are totally fresh. The suspense comes from waiting to see, not what happens next, but HOW it happens. It is a tradition as old as bardic times, when audiences might hear GILGAMESH, the ILIAD, or BEOWULF, and marvel at the familiar events being told in new ways. It demands the existence of an accepted canon, fixed in outline but variable in detail. And it also requires that the stories should touch upon something deeply important, the religious beliefs of a people. It may be a shock to think of the life of Jesus Christ in these terms, but the many gospels, biblical and otherwise, certainly provide variations on the common theme, and the religious implications are indisputable. When I picked up a copy of Saramago's retelling of the story, I intended just to use it for reference, but I found myself reading from beginning to end, enthralled.

It is hard to talk objectively of a religious book, since different readers will be affected by what they bring to it. This is a novel, a very free retelling of the story that will be anathema to fundamentalists. But every page shines with the belief that religion matters and divinity exists; it is not a book for atheists either. I myself come to it from a strong religious upbringing which changed in my twenties to what I can only call an interested agnosticism. I also read it immediately after two other books: Saramago's DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS, which broke my fear of this challenging author, and Philip Pullman's THE GOOD MAN JESUS AND THE SCOUNDREL CHRIST, which tells the story of Jesus entirely in human terms, rejecting the miracles and apocalyptic elements as inventions of the Christian church. I knew from DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS that Saramago had little patience with the work of the church, and rejects a God who can allow such death and bloodshed in his name and do nothing to intervene. One chapter in THE GOSPEL has God listing in alphabetical detail all the martyrdoms that would befall the saints of the church, not to mention the horrors of the crusades and the inquisition.

But I leap ahead. Judging from the beginning of the book, which dispenses with the virginity of Mary and places Jesus and his siblings in the midst of a normally squabbling family, I had thought that Saramago would also present an entirely human Jesus. But his context is emphatically a religious one, contrasting two opposing strands. There is the complex system of observances in which Jesus would have been brought up as a devout Jew. And Mary (who, as a woman, is marginalized in religious law) receives mysterious visits from an angel who leaves minor miracles in his wake. Angel of God, or messenger of the Devil? Saramago leaves the matter open, and continues to do so. Jesus spends four years as apprentice to a shepherd known only as Pastor, whose true nature is ambiguous until the end. Even in the conversation between God and Jesus referred to above, Satan appears as a third participant, on friendly terms with God and joining in from time to time. Indeed, Satan often seems the more attractive of the two.

Saramago's Jesus will have several fathers. First and most obviously Joseph, who is treated with unusual detail here as a vigorous and competent man burdened by guilt because of one original sin -- that, knowing of Herod's intended massacre of the innocents, he used his knowledge to save only his own family without warning his neighbors. Saramago parallels Joseph's life to that of Jesus in uncanny ways, even down to his death at the same age. When Jesus learns the circumstances of his birth, he too is assailed by guilt. It is now that he meets Pastor, who becomes like a second father to him, presiding as he drops the strict Jewish observances in favor of a more humanistic morality; there is a significant occasion when Jesus refuses to kill the lamb he has been given for the Passover sacrifice. His apprenticeship ends when he meets his third and true father, God. Now fully a man, he meets Mary Magdalene and lives with her for the rest of his life. He also begins the series of miracles recorded in the gospels, though not yet understanding where his powers come from. In a second meeting enshrouded in mists in the middle of the Sea of Gennaseret, God makes clear what he wants of him: nothing less than the foundation of the Catholic Church through his son's example and sacrifice. But when Jesus realizes the horrors that will ensue, he tries to defy God by bringing about his own death, not as the Son of God but as King of the Jews -- a claim designed to force the Romans to execute him on political grounds. He fails, of course, in secularizing his role; and for good or ill, the rest is history.

2010-07-26 | reader/writer/musician (Baltimore, MD) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Shouldn't Amazon state the case size?. The case is so small I decided not to read it.
The case was way SMALL, so I had to order another edition. It would be a great help if Amazon stated the case size, something like Very Small, Small, Medium, Large. I received an edition from the publisher Harvill (ISBN 9781860466847) and the case is real small (it seems Harvill has several editions for this same book), this one a picture in the cover with big letters J and S in blue and wine-red and a heart crossed by a sword on the lower left corner of the cover.

2010-06-24 (MADRID, MADRID Spain) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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You can't cheat a Cheater
I was at the attorney's office again inquiring how to deal with crazy people without them suing me. And, that is not as easy as it sounds.
Usually, our conversations are a bit rambling, and we end up talking about the army, tea baggers or the nuts who run the various governments.
But, this time, he got on the subject of Jose Saramago, a Portuguese writer who did not believe in punctuation or quotation marks, particularly "Blindness" which I have just begun and which the attorney considered a masterpiece.
He was practically raving about the author, the rambling sentences, punctuation, and story impact.
Now, I have had plenty of folks recommend a book or an author, but not with such fervor.
Giovanni Pontiero translated "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" from the original Portuguese into English. (Translators can make or break a book and Pontiero seems to have done an excellent job.)
The Life of Jesus, as portrayed by Saramago does not exactly meet Preacher Phil's exacting standards, but actually makes more sense than the pulpit version. Or perhaps it makes as much senselessness. The preacher's theory is that we should spend every second of your existence praising our Creator and, when we die, fly to the bosom of Abraham where we will spend every second of our existence into eternity and beyond praising our Creator. Phooey, I give my pets a better deal than that.
But, this is exactly what the novel's Jesus is faced with. His God, perhaps in collusion with Pastor, wishes to kill him, and create centuries of martyrdom and slaughter to aggrandize more worshippers than the other gods. Jesus fails the double cross.
Perhaps, the moral of the story is you cannot cheat a Cheater. Figure it out yourself. But, in any case, the author presents a powerful story and I am looking forward to reading his other titles.

2010-03-12 | cecilkunkle (On the banks of the Wabash far away) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Lacking Faith in His Own Doubt ...
... author José Saramago sacralizes his skepticism by writing this humanized biography of the mythical Jesus of Nazareth up to by not a moment beyond his death by cruxifixion. Fully half of the book describes Jesus's family life and childhood up to age thirteen, at which time the boy's father is unjustly executed by Roman soldiers. Thereupon Jesus leaves his widowed mother and siblings in Nazareth, and begins his quest to expiate his own and his father's guilt over the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem at the time of his birth. After four years as a `shepherd' under the tutelege of `Pastor" (the Devil), Jesus meets God in the desert and learns something of his destiny. As he seeks to return to his home in Nazareth, he encounters Mary Magdalene, who initiates him into physical love and who vows to follow him devotedly. His career of preaching, his miracles, his gathering of disciples, and his decision to seek crucifixion all are depicted tersely in the final chapters of this "Gospel", along with manifold predictions of the future of the disciples and of the religious empire they will found.

Evangelical Christians, be advised! This book will offend you. Its portrayal of the life of Jesus is far more blasphemous than the infamous story of the Prophet Mohammed that earned Salmon Rushdie a death sentence by `fatwah'. Author Saramago would surely have been burned at the stake in the Rome of the Holy Inquisition, or in the Geneva of John Calvin, but Christians have evolved morally since then.

Nevertheless, Saramago's `theology' is blatantly heretical by the standards of any established Judeo-Christian Confession. God and Satan are inseparable and interdependent in Saramago's "Gnostic" vision, and both stand to `gain' by the expansion of God's dominion over Earth that will result from the blood sacrifice of God's explicitly created Son on the cross. Notice that fatal word "created". That's heresy enough for both Orthodox and Catholic Christians, who proclaim the Trinity co-eval and uncreated. The asymmetrical relationship of Creator and Created is perhaps the central theme of Saramago's Gospel. The act of creation, Saramago suggests, inevitably delimits and diminishes the potency of the creator. A shoemaker loses control of a shoe's state-of-being as soon as he's stitched it together; the leather will stiffen, the sole will wear out. A father procreates, but a son is soon willfully independent. God's Son has a mind of His own, and is none too cooperative about eschatological matters. There may be a serious lesson in all this for mankind in its efforts to create intelliegent machines.

The really interesting part of this book -- the philosophical agonizing over the limits of God's omnipotence -- doesn't begin until page 169, with the chapter in which the boy Jesus confronts the rabbis in the Temple. (If the book has a literary weakness, it's that it hesitates too long to raise its stakes.) Limited Omnipotence may seem immediately to be an oxymoron, but Saramago's Jesus offers no other way to make sense of the Judeo-Christian narrative of sin and salvation. Weary as `this reader' is of such a narrative, I find Saramago's convoluted theology extremely interesting, and possibly the best `defense' of human Free Will in the intellectual marketplace. It's the capacity of the Created to disappoint its Creator that constitutes its `freedom.'

You won't enjoy this book, I promise you, unless you are susceptible to its earnest philosophical/theological meditations. Saramago, you might say, plays God the Narrator according to his own sort of script; at times, he professes omniscience and at other times he chooses to act coy and deny his authority over his own tale. As a ploy, it's either wonderfully clever or else bloody annoying, depending altogether on the reader's willingness to let him get away with it. I'd read Saramago before; I knew what I was taking on, but I found "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" far more profound and provocative than I expected. Saramago surely deserved his 1998 Nobel Prize.

2010-01-11 (Wherever I am, I am.) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Thought provoking creatively written
For those who wish they might have lived to watch Jesus grow up, this might be interesting reading. The author provides a fictional (based on historical information, however) narrative of a human boy's journey to manhood. A sort of reality check from the earth-bound side. Jesus was a real flesh and blood boy, foibles and all, the author proposes. A most interesting and compelling read. Read with an open mind.

2009-03-16 | monalisasmiles (Georgia) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Description

The year: 1936. Europe dances while an invidious dictator establishes himself in Portugal. The city: Lisbon-gray, colorless, chimerical. Ricardo Reis, a doctor and poet, has just come home after sixteen years in Brazil. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

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Customer Reviews

Harder to relate if you're not Portuguese
Saramago is my favorite living author, yet I felt I missed a lot of this novel's power simply because I am not very familiar with Portuguese literature (Pessoa and other writers), culture or history. I am familiar enough with 20th century history and the years leading up to World War II, so I wasn't completely lost, but I suspect if I had been raised in Portugal I would have given this novel a much higher rating. Some knowledge of Franco's rise to power in Spain would also increase your enjoyment of this work.

Even missing some of this knowledge, Saramago's writing is still a wonder to me. Although it can be dense and demanding, he always has had the ability to keep me focused and turning pages and this novel was no exception. His characters and their thoughts are, as always, well-developed and you can easily see some of yourself in each one of them.

I recommend it as a strong piece of writing, with the caveat that you might not get all of what he intended his readers to get out of the novel if you are not familiar with Portugal's history and culture or with the state of geopolitics in the 1930s.

2007-03-07 (San Francisco, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Brilliant and Disturbing
I highly recommend this great book by a great, Nobel-Prize winning author. It is so well written that it almost rises to a book of poetry, vaguely reminiscent of fellow Nobel-Prize winning William Faulkner; the psychological drilling is deep, but worth the effort. Though Saramago's writings are more structured and less rambling than Faulkner's, the passion, the tone, and the eloquence are the same, at least for me.

This book is all about out-of-control circumstances in pre-War Portugal and how a fictitious doctor and poet of pre-War Portugal, Ricardo Reis, deals with them. Insanity is in the air, and deadly nationalism is rising along with the military coups and Nazism in neighboring countries. Quite by chance, he arrives in his native Portugal in 1936 just in time for this brewing storm, after spending the previous 16 years in Brazil. It reminds me a lot of the great and disturbing 70's movie Cabaret, where pre-War, Brown-shirt Germany was seen through the prism of a decadent Berlin cabaret, and the people who worked or played there.

Ricardo Reis does little else than think; it is his way of life, and circumstances give him a lot to work with. He is very much a loner, passably sociable on the outside, but self-centered, moody, timid, guarded on the inside, a lot like you and me if we were honest enough with ourselves. But unlike most of us, I hope, his most intimate relationship seems to be with Death itself. This might be the logical end of existentialist thought; things are bad, God is non-existent or non-caring, Death is the answer. (I think Life is the answer, and the transcendent Christian God who gives peace despite circumstances.)

In a nutshell, I like HOW Saramago writes more than WHAT he writes about.

The book is a bit heavy but well worth the read.

2006-07-04 | Romans 8:1 (Baltimore) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Saramago At His Best
This is Saramago at his best. The very first sentence of the novel sets the mood. The writing has a dream-like, floating feel throughout. Saramago indeterminately mixes tenses; he often goes from "I" to "he" (speaking of the same character) in the same paragraph. But he does this purposely to enhance his idea of identity and relationships.

Marcenda's left hand is an additional character in the novel. In one scene it is described as appearing to "glory at being seen".

After reading "The Year of the Death of Richardo Reis" I can understand why he won the nobel prize. If I had only read "Blindness" then I wouldn't have understood. In my opinion, "Blindness" is merely an intellectualized Stephen King novel; intellectualized because of the writing and because it is allegorical. It reminds me of Camus' "The Plague". In and of itself "Blindness" wouldn't have deserved a Nobel Prize, but in conjunction with his other works, especially this one being reviewed, Saramago certainly deserves the award.

If you haven't read Pessoa but like Saramago, you should put Pessoa next on your reading list.

2006-06-11 | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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Brilliant book but easy to misunderstand
This book is usually on most readers' list of top three Saramago masterpieces. But in reading the English language reviews I realize that most people are missing a very simple aspect to the entire book. Of all of Fernando Pessoa's poetic personae, Ricardo Reis was the least politically engaged with the world, the artist in the ivory tower, contemplating the world of beauty. Saramago, as experienced readers intuit, is a very different sort of artist, for whom literature is a form of moral and political engagement with the world. Saramago has pointed out in interviews that one of the premises of this novel was the confrontation between the politically disengaged artist and an Iberia that was quickly becoming enshrouded in Fascism.

Understanding this confrontation might make this novel more sensible to English speaking non-Portuguese 21st century readers.

2006-03-11 (from the road, USA) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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A supplement to the previous review
The previous reviewer suggested that the "ghost" character Pessoa may have been based on an actual person. It's true. Fernando Pessoa was an outstanding Portuguese poet. What's interesting here is that Pessoa wrote under several pen-names, and in some cases he would write praise or criticism in one pan-name of his own writing done in another pen-name. These pen-names were characters in and of themselves. The various pen-names had back grounds and histories which gave each one a unique perspective to "their" writings. One of Pessoa's pen-names was Dr. Ricardo Reis.

Saramago's Dr. Reis is faithful to the background devised by Pessoa, and the facts regarding Pessoa himself, so these conversations between Reis and the ghost Pessoa can be seen as conversations with one's self. It's brilliant. It's beyond brilliant.

If you are interested in an excellent Pessoa book, try The Book of Disquiet.

2005-01-05 | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 5

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The Notebook

Product Details

• Notes: BUY WITH Faith, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and assistance to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Demand: New
• ISBN13: 9781844676149

Description

A unique journey into the personal and political world of the Nobel laureate and author of Blindness. Provocative and lyrical, The Notebook records a year in the life of José Saramago, beginning on the eve of the 2008 US presidential election. In these pages, he evokes life in his beloved city of Lisbon, revisits conversations with friends, and meditates on his favorite authors. Precise observations and moments of arresting significance are rendered with pointillist detail, and together demonstrate an acute understanding of our times. Characteristically critical and uncompromising, Saramago dissects the financial crisis, deplores Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, traces the ongoing inquiry into the execution of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground, and charts the transition from the era of George W. Bush to that of Barack Obama.

Available for the first time in English, The Notebook offers a rare glimpse into the mind of one of the most original writers of our era.

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Customer Reviews

THE NOTEBOOK
I haven't finished the book thus it wouldn't be a good review. Of the part that I have
read -- it is wonderful. What else could one expect from Saramago.

2010-07-11 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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José Saramago: Ave atque Vale
One of the century's finest writers has died. José Saramago was an author who began writing late in life but in the time he wrote he managed to share with the world some very disturbing thoughts and yet at the same time make those disturbing thoughts into very beautiful literature. Few who have read BLINDNESS, ALL THE NAMES, SEEING, DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS, THE DOUBLE, to name but a few of his works, will ever forget the impact his writing had/has on us. This book THE NOTEBOOK takes on a different kind of strange journey - a remembrance of the time when reporting in the media meant communication of the world as it was happening. Not everyone will agree with all of his thoughts, but no one will deny they should not be addressed.

Now, with our information fed in bits, chips, and pixels on such wildly diverse formats as Twitter, Facebook, TV talk shows and reality series we must face the fact that reportage of the quality found in these essays is a thing of the past. Unless...unless more people will read this book, remember Saramago, and start to think again. José Saramago will be much missed. Grady Harp, June 10

2010-06-21 (Los Angeles, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 5

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Absolutely Wonderful
Absolutely wonderful. Commentaries on world matters, George Bush, the economic crisis, religion, and much, much more by one of the greatest living writers. Erudite, literary, compassionate, provocative. Compare these with the commentary currently available...well, there is no comparison. If you love his novels, you will find the Notebook as compelling. If you have not read his novels perhaps The Notebook will serve as a good introduction. Then, I would suggest All the Names, whose themes resonate in some of these brief, but weighty observations.

2010-06-03 | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 5

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Baltasar and Blimunda

Description

From the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, a “brilliant...enchanting novel” (New York Times Book Review) of romance, deceit, religion, and magic set in eighteenth-century Portugal at the height of the Inquisition. National bestseller. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

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Customer Reviews

Not a Book for Haters
I read this book a couple years ago, and seriously it's the best novel I've ever read. It's all about how love and magic and poetry can and should supercede all else. Some see it more as a history, some as a love story, but I see it more as a statement about how to live a life and why. Really, if you haven't read this book, then do it. Worst that can happen is you don't get the point.

2010-01-31 (California) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Excellent service
Excellent, fast service. I encourage anyone thinking about purchasing a used book and you can use this vendor, do so. You're unlikely to be disappointed.

2009-08-10 (Dallas, Texas) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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First book since childhood that I read two times
Epic love story set during the construction of the convent at Mafra, now one of Portugal's most popular tourist sites. Sometimes the narration got to rambling and I had to reread passages. I didn't think the Passarola had any chance of flying so it was amusing when it did. The ending was so devastating, and it made me want to write a screenplay adaptation. Since childhood, I have never revisited a novel, even if it was one of my favorites. I found myself coming back to this one a couple of months after the first read. It really stayed with me.

2009-07-17 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A Banquet of Words, Sauced with Irony
Baltazar and Blimunda is a novel of historical pageantry, set in Portugal in the early 18th Century. Like most historical novels, the fun comes from the luscious descriptions of a past made exotic by time - lusty, vivid, scurrilous, pungent, gritty. The better the historical novelist is at his craft, the less his characters seem "just like us" in flamboyant costuming. Saramago is very good at his craft; none of his characters - king, priest, or peasant - show any signs of psychological modernity. They truly exist in a pre-modern paradigm, a "mentality" long lost.

[I can vouch for this! One of the players in B&B is my old friend, the composer Domenico Scarlatti, and Saramago's portrayal of him is tantalizingly accurate.]

Perhaps this degree of historical insight is easier for Jose Saramago than for other historical fictionalists because he himself exists in a 19th Century mentality - half the temporal distance back to his subject matter - at a time when 'heresy' was still a burning topic of thought, when the hierarchies of society and of creation were just beginning to topple, when skepticism was still dangerous and therefore enchanting. In short, there is something anachronistic about Saramago's mindset, and if you look for pertinence in his work, you're likely to be disappointed. Read him for his lush verbal skills, for his inventiveness, and above all for his sly wit.

Saramago is often linked by critics to the so-called "magic realists" such as Gabriel Marquez, most of them writers in Spanish, but Saramago has a closer heritage among the little-known writers of Portugal and Brazil. His particular sardonic irony is inherited from the Brazilian Machado di Asis, a very great writer that few Americans have even heard of. Farther back in time, there's the epic poet Camoens; the 'voyage' themes of B&B make frequent allusions to Camoens's Lusiad. Like most historical novels, B&B draws heavily on the reader's knowledge of history and of the locale; I hasten to confess that some of my relish for this book comes from recognizing the scenery, remembering the food, catching the acrid scents of Portugal per se. But I imagine the allure can pull you either way; after reading this extravagant prose, don't be surprised if you find yourself consulting travel brochures about Lusitania.

2009-01-29 (Wherever I am, I am.) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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3.5 out of 5: Enchanting prose and believable love story
This book is filled with absolutely enchanting prose with a very unique style. Saramago portrays an enduring love between the two main characters. There's plenty of magical realism, which keeps the book lively and fresh. The book as a whole, however, is a bit dull in places. Overall, a worthwhile read.

2008-08-14 | Literary License (Houston, Texas United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Death with Interruptions

Product Details

• Notes: BUY WITH Coolness, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and appointment to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• ISBN13: 9780547247885
• Fit out: New

Description

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Customer Reviews

Who Needs Death?
This is the first Saramago book that I have read, but it will not be the last. I had previously been put off by the physical appearance of his text -- those rectangular blocks of gray print with no indents, no quotations, and very few paragraphs. But what I had not realized was the depth of his intelligence, the brilliance of his invention, or most importantly the extent of his wit. This is a satire, based on the simple premise that Death, or rather the small-d death responsible for this particular country, takes a seven-month holiday and in all that time no one dies. A good thing? Not necessarily, because the inability to die affects also the terminally ill and the victims of horrendous road accidents, so that soon the hospitals, hospices, and eventide homes are full to bursting. The undertakers are out of work. Before long, the maphia (sic) have gone into the business of transporting moribund family members over the border so that they may end their lives elsewhere.

But Saramago does much more than merely play with amusing what-ifs; there are philosophical implications also. There is, for instance, a telephone conversation early in the book between the prime minister and the cardinal. While the politician juggles impressively vapid press-releases, the churchman points out that without death there is no need for a church, and that it is his duty to pray for the resumption of death so that his flock may ascend to eternal life. Of all the numerous targets in the book (the author is an equal-opportunity skeptic), Saramago reserves his strongest ire for organized religion; as one of the characters remarks, "god is god and he's done almost nothing but fail." But it is not just the church that needs death; Saramago's point is that it is vital to life, and indeed we should all welcome it, even in its unpredictability.

None of the people in the book are given proper names. Nonetheless, individual characters do begin to emerge, starting with death herself (for in romance languages the word for death is always feminine). Even when she decides to resume work, there is one person (a professional cellist -- Saramago clearly knows music) who somehow manages to elude her. So she visits his home, watches him walking his dog, attends his rehearsals and one of his performances, and finds herself falling in love. The book, which had begun as an intellectual game, ends in warm humanity. Medieval artists used to depict the Dance of Death as a sinister reaping by a skeleton with a scythe. Saramago gives us a dance WITH death, in the form of an attractive young woman who comes into our willing embrace. Would it were ever so!

2010-07-22 | reader/writer/musician (Baltimore, MD) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Saramago -- for fun.
It's just so much fun. When the Cardinal calls, outraged, to say that the cessation of death imperils the Church, when the narrator explores the fate of insurance companies or funeral homes in a country without death or launches upon an analysis of the handwriting found on death violet-colored stationery. It's just so much fun.

Saramago skewers society and its institutions -- yet portrays individuals with tenderness and dignity. I think he is one of the best for creating characters who are truly and convincingly good.

Half of the book is spent exploring the idea of a country without death, half to showing what happens when death herself trips up and falls in love. It is all a romp.

Please ignore people who say Saramago is "difficult". They are just trying to make themselves feel elevated -- and we should call their bluff. If you're reading Saramago for the first time, you'll need to accustom yourself to a few differences in the use of punctuation and the paragraph -- innovations which function so smoothly it is likely they will be adopted by other writers.

Two hundred pages of delight and then -- a big bang-up old-fashioned ending that made me catch my breath. Such fun! Especially if mortality's been sending you small shocks lately, this is one to put on top of your reading list.

2010-07-20 | www.guttersnipedas.blogspot.com (Tokyo, Japan) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Perfect as always in the Saramago's case
Excellent book. I think most of the 5 stars reviews tell everything about the book and I can't add anything else about the story. I just want to add something about Saramago's style.
I'm Brazilian and, of course, I read it in Portuguese. Besides this book, I also read "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ", "Blindness" and "Seeing". Saramago has a very peculiar way of punctuation and this bothers some people. In my opinion, it's hard in the beginning but you get used to it very soon. His style is unique and this is one of the several reasons for his Nobel Prize.
I read some one star reviews complaining exactly about this issue and saying that this was a bad translation problem which is not true, not at all. The few pages I read in English are following exactly the original way of punctuation.

I really recommend this book for everybody.

2010-07-11 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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What happens on the following day?
"The following day, no one died."

It almost pains me to not give 'Death with Interruptions' the highest possible rating, because it is Jose Saramago, and because the writing is beautiful, and because it ends so very elegantly. It may, in fact, be one of the most perfect endings I have ever read. Even so, I have to be honest and say that I feel that other parts of the book are flawed, and if I didn't know I would be rewarded, I might not have stuck it out to the end.

The concept, like much of Saramago's work, is immediately engaging: what if death stopped taking lives for a time? Within the borders of a single country, for a certain time, nobody dies. What if death did the unthinkable - what if she changed the rules?

The results, in Saramago's able and imaginative hands, are at times sad and at other times ridiculous, but they never fail to be plausible. I can see everyday people, politicians, criminals, and businessmen reacting in much the way he describes. 'Death with Interruptions' doesn't have the powerful shock value of 'Blindness' or the simple elegance of 'The Stone Raft,' but it is always believable.

For such a small book, however, 'Death with Interruptions' tries to be too large a story. Saramago, in my opinion, is best when he focuses on the everyday person, when he takes big world-shaking events and places them into the context of the individual experience. Much of 'Death with Interruptions' is about government and religious leaders making big decisions, and in those parts, he lost me. When the story found the individual family whose tragedy sought a solution to death's sudden absence, or when it later found the man who was able to defy death herself, those are the moments when the book really found its center and its focus, when the story became everything I hoped it might be. But it has to be said, some of the other parts of the book, the parts where we lose focus on the individual and look at the movements of a nation, almost lost me.

Saramago's use of language is lyrical, almost poetic. His ideas are groundbreaking and original. His vision is fearless. And when he's really on his game, his stories are breathtaking marvels. 'Death with Interruptions' is nearly all of that. It loses focus at a few key moments, but finds it again, and the ending is everything it could have been and more. The ending makes reading the book worth it.

The ending, when it comes, is beautiful.

2010-07-02 | Idle Rich (Bremerton, WA USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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Love and Death
Saramago, who died this month, [June,2010] wrote a cleverly satirical treatise on how the living and the dying face death.
Some parts are reminiscent of de Maupassant's practical French peasants who can't afford to mourn the loss of loved ones. The
short novel falls into two sections--first, how a nation faces the problem of immortality; second, how love proves death to be weak.
Definitely a book to treasure.

2010-06-21 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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