saramago.jpg
All the Names, the story of a clerk in the office of the registrar of births and deaths, a massive building filled with shifting piles of paper.
Then I read (and reviewed) Blindness which, thanks to the movie version, everyone has heard of, although setting it in a modern concrete city makes it much more stark and violent than it was in my imagination: in the 1960s, in a small city of narrow streets and crumbling colonial-style buildings.
After that I read The Cave, about a potter struggling against the inevitable domination of plastic plates and then The Double, about the shifting emotions of a man who discovers he has a double living nearby. Now that there will be no new Saramago books it’s time to reread these and then go on to the all the others.
Saramago's style of long sentences and dense paragraphs is worthy of emulation and in fact many of my writerly friends do just that, although one reviewer reports that it "can be off-putting . . . page after page of run-on sentences, few paragraphs indentations, and a lack of quotation marks." However, a teacher I know uses a "long and beautiful sentence" from The Double to show students how a master makes it work.
Saramago won a Nobel Prize in 1998 and there’s a detailed (but succinct) autobiography posted on their website. Visit the José Saramago Foundation for more on this great man.
