What I Read in August 2010

Cathleen Schine, The Evolution of Jane. Recovering from a divorce and also mourning the loss of a friendship, Jane goes with a natural history group to the Galapagos Island to see how creatures evolve. Interesting to me, but then I always liked Darwin.

Tony, Hillerman, The Sinister Pig. One of the series about the Navajo Tribal Police, the legendary Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and the soft-heart Jim Chee. Sinister doings in the oil and gas fields. Chee finally gets his girl.

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. After struggling through Ulysses, I turned to this book to meet Stephen Dedalus in the years before he knew Leopold Bloom. I have a problem with the young artist in the portrait. I find him almost insufferable. He is intelligent and sensitive, but also arrogant and concerned solely with his own feelings and reactions. Disliking a character in a book does not condemn the book. Joyce has skillfully portrayed a certain person in a certain place at a certain time. If the person is Joyce’s own young self, then he did not like himself very much.

Tracy Kidder, Home Town. Home town is Northampton, Massachusetts. A pleasant old community on the Connecticut River, Northampton is best known as the home of Smith College, but Kidder is more interested in the variety of “townies” who make it their home: the local policeman, his ne’er do well drug informers, the mayor, the local business people. Kidder always brings us real people and real places, whether they practicing medicine in Haiti or teaching school in Massachusetts.

The following books have posted comments:

Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon

José Saramago, All the Names

Earl Derr Biggers, The Chinese Parrot (Charlie Chan mystery)

José Saramago, All the Names

All the names are on cards in the Central Registry. The names are the living and the dead. The living are increasing and the dead are increasing even more because dead is dead, a permanent condition, and those names are piling up, requiring us to move the back wall of the Central Registry to make more space. More space, but not more light. It is very dark in the archives of the dead. Take a flashlight and tie Ariadne’s string to your ankle so that you can find your way back.

I struggled through my first reading of a Saramago novel (The Double), was brought to reluctant admiration by the second (Blindness) and have been totally hypnotized by All the Names. For a novel based on names, it is very shy about revealing them. José has a name but others have only titles or descriptors: the unknown woman, the Registrar, the shepherd. As to José himself,

Apart from this first name, José, Senhor José also has surnames, very ordinary ones, nothing extravagant, one from his father’s side, another from his mother’s, as is normal, names legitimately transmitted, as we could confirm in the Register of Births in the Central Registry if the matter justified our interest and if the results of that inquiry repaid the labour of merely confirming what we already know.

You have just experienced a sample of Saramago’s style. Be patient, it grows on you as we learn not only what is in José’s mind and experience but also what the author has to say about it. The reality of the Central Registry is not the people or their names, but the record cards themselves. They must be kept — in ink on thin paper in the traditional style — and filed and, ultimately, pushed into the archives of the dead. Where are the real dead, the bodies represented by the piles of paper trash pushed to the back wall of the Central Registry? In the General Cemetery which, unlike the Central Registry, has no walls, permitting it to expand into the land of the living.

Like floodwaters that begin by encroaching on the low-lying land, snaking along valleys and then, slowly, creeping up hillsides, the graves gained ground, often to the detriment of agriculture, for the besieged owners had no alternative but to sell off strips of land, at other times the graves skirted orchards, wheat fields, threshing floors and cattle pens, always within sight of the houses, and, often, if you like, right next door.

When you are buried in the General Cemetery in addition to the names you already have, you receive a number. Quite arbitrarily these numbers are switched around so that no one is buried where you think. You cannot find the real dead any more than you can find the paper dead.

Saramago follows José as he goes in search of the real person, the unknown women whose record card he has. The resulting adventures show us unexpected aspectof this hesitant, subordinated bureaucrat. The ending is ambiguous, but I interpret it that we cannot know the reality of the living person or the dead body, we can only hope to affect the card in the Central Registry of all the names.

What I Read in February 2010

It’s snowing in southwestern Connecticut, every place I planned to go is closed, so I’m ending the month February early, with the hope for better weather in March.

John Mortimer, Rumpole and the Reign of Terror. This is the only book I haven’t already posted about, so here is a cover shot to make up for it. This may be the last Rumpole Mortimer wrote since it dates from 2006. It is not his strongest effort, but I am fond of old Horace and wanted to say goodbye properly.

Also read – and posted on -

José Saramago, The Double
Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina
P. D. James, The Private Patient
José Saramago, Blindness
Lorraine Watkins, Prairie Tree Letters
James Webb, Born Fighting
Alan Bennett, Talking Heads
Gerald S. Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded

José Saramago, Blindness

I wish I could say something profound about this book, but what? The shift in tone and seriousness in Blindness from Saramago’s earlier The Double caught me by surprise. Here we have the same mannerisms — the long sentences, compressed dialogue, authorial asides. Whereas, in The Double, these techniques subtly undermine the credibility of the book, here Saramago’s style delivers a chilling fantasy of a world gone blind.

The blindness is sudden and complete and apparently transmitted like a disease through the slightest contacts. This is not a dark blindness, but a dazzling whiteness behind which everything vanishes. In a winter drive in the mountains, I drove once into a whiteout of snow. It was sudden and complete: I was in the car and it was moving, the tires vibrating on the road below us, but the outside world disappeared with no front or back or sides or horizon. It was terrifying and, thank God, it was brief.

When the blindness begins to spread, the government quarantines the afflicted in a vain attempt to contain the epidemic. Saramago gives us two situations of social breakdown. First, within the asylum and unprotected from the worst elements, those who go blind early are brutally victimized. When quarantine is no longer possible, the blind stumble out into a city where people roam the streets looking for food and stray dogs eat the corpses. We read on, not in hope that the blindness will abate, but because Saramago involves us in the lives of a few carefully-defined characters. They are characters without names, only definitions and those mostly related to sight: “the first blind man,” “the girl with dark glasses,” “the boy with a squint.” Initially this distances us from them. We resist knowing them, just as they resist going blind, but their struggles draw us in, until we can no more resist caring about them than they can resist acknowledging their loss.

The most enigmatic character is the doctor’s wife, the one person who keeps her sight and uses it to help preserve as many other as she can. When the quarantined blind break out of the asylum, they ask the doctor’s wife what she sees.

What’s the world like these days, the old man with the black eyepatch had asked, and the doctor’s wife replied, There’s no difference between inside and outside, between here and there, between the many and the few, between what we’re living through and what we shall have to live through, And the people, how are they coping, asked the girl with dark glasses, They go around like ghosts, this must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it….

All the characters in The Double have names, tediously long and elaborate names: Tertuliano Afonso and Maria da Paz and even the dog, who has a Latin name. Yet I never came as close to those people who had names and apartments and jobs and cars and clothes and all the other appurtenances of life as I did to these shabby, filthy, hungry blind characters stumbling through each day.

José Saramago, The Double

If you found that you had a “double”, another person identical to you — same features, voice, scars, even fingerprints — how would you react? In The Double, José Saramago explores this situation. A history teacher learns that an actor who takes bit parts in movies is his double, and not as a part he is acting, but all the time.

This is is my first Saramago book, and it was tedious going. When an 18-page chapter is one long, single paragraph, I ask myself why a writer expects me to persevere. Within this unbroken text dialogue is telescoped together, making each exchange a puzzle exercise. The actor and his wife are having a quarrel:

If I were you, I would tear it up and throw it away or burn it, after all, dead dogs don’t bite, It’s hardly a matter of life or death, Besides, I don’t think the beard would suit you. This is no  joke, It was just a manner of speaking, all I know is that it unsettles my mind, it even troubles my body to know that there is a man in this city who looks like you….

And so on. Capitalization and commas are as in the original.

Saramago is an omniscient author, who knows all and tells all. He enters into each character’s thoughts thoroughly, often mixing speculation with narrative.

However, the privilege we enjoy of knowing everything that is going to happen up until the very last page of this story, apart from those things that might still need to be invented, allows us to say that tomorrow, the actor Daniel Santa-Clara will make a phone call to Maria da Paz’s apartment, purely to find out if anyone is there, we are, don’t forget, in high summer, the holiday period, but he will not say a word, not a single sound will issue from his lips, total silence, lest there should be any confusion, on the part of the person at the other end, between his voice and that of Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, for in that case, he would probably have no option but to pretend, to assume his identity, with, bearing in mind the current state of affairs,entirely unforeseeable consequences.

That, in case you did not notice, was one sentence. The phone call has not happened yet, but it will happen and, when it happens it may be this way or may be that way because now we are only speculating about it and it hasn’t actually happened yet. My own emotional involvement in this remains just as cool as Saramago’s  prose.

Some of Saramago’s asides are really quite wonderful:

He [the dog] will return to Tertuliano Maximo Afonso’s bedroom at first light to check that nothing has moved on this side of the earth either, for what dogs most want in life is for no one to go away.

The plot is relatively simple, the number of character is manageable, and the ending is disappointing. Saramago employs one of fiction’s tiredest devices by unexpectedly killing off key characters, followed by deja vu all over again.

It is hard to judge an ambitious novel like The Double in translation. Enough of the verbal agility comes through in the English to suggest that the Portuguese text must be very rewarding. I call the novel ambitious because that can be the only justification for the unnecessary difficulties imposed on the reader. This author is saying, Look, what I have to say is important, That important? Yes, and by making  you exert yourself to jump through my stylistic hoops, hoops that I alone can impose and through which you alone can jump, you earn the rewards of enjoying my insights and appreciating my cleverness.