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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Senhor Jose is the only person named in this strange, funny, but extremely creepy story about a lonely file clerk who works the Central Registry, a government organization that is the epitome of mundane civil servant work that deals with birth and death information. I thought the descriptions of the workplace and the racing thoughts of Senhor Jose were excellent, and captured the human condition in a work environment perfectly. I could see why this received the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature. That being said…
Senhor Jose, usually fixated on the lives of famous people he comes across in his work, becomes obsessed with an unknown woman after her information accidentally gets stuck to other paperwork he’s handling. He goes to great lengths to find her. One part of me was like “okay, it’s a story to show that all of us matter even if we aren’t famous, and we should care about those who live quiet lives, too.” The other part of me was disturbed by how obsessed Senhor Jose became, and wondered if this was more a story about mental illness and how servitude can aggravate an already unsound mind. Dude talks to the ceiling a few times (and the sassy ceiling talks back!) Or maybe it was about how we are all connected, often without realizing it. And that perhaps we need to remember what’s important because nothing is what it seems.
Maybe it was all the above. All I know is I said “wtf” out loud when I finished it. That being said, I liked it?
Senhor Jose, usually fixated on the lives of famous people he comes across in his work, becomes obsessed with an unknown woman after her information accidentally gets stuck to other paperwork he’s handling. He goes to great lengths to find her. One part of me was like “okay, it’s a story to show that all of us matter even if we aren’t famous, and we should care about those who live quiet lives, too.” The other part of me was disturbed by how obsessed Senhor Jose became, and wondered if this was more a story about mental illness and how servitude can aggravate an already unsound mind. Dude talks to the ceiling a few times (and the sassy ceiling talks back!) Or maybe it was about how we are all connected, often without realizing it. And that perhaps we need to remember what’s important because nothing is what it seems.
Maybe it was all the above. All I know is I said “wtf” out loud when I finished it. That being said, I liked it?
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I’ve begun to think Saramago is an excellent writer whose books I really just don’t care much for. I don’t know how else to describe it. There’s clearly something brilliant happening in his mind. I can see that he’s writing in a vein that I have great respect for, but neither of the novels of his that I’ve read has really been compelling to me in any way. His writing has some of the trappings of Borges or Calvino, but with something fundamental missing. The whole thing seems gestural and allegorical and rarely becomes human, and then the gestures and symbols themselves don’t really seem to indicate anything.
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
It really is a great story, touching, haunting and beautiful in its own way - Saramago did not win the Nobel Prize for literature for nothing - but I have a problem with the way it's written. It's like Saramago is both a good and a bad writer for this. What I mean is the lack of paragraph breaks, the lack of speech marks and how it's not freshly and intensely written: more like rambling, brown and dense, and dampened down, even if in this case it might match well the dusty bureaucratic atmosphere that is its subject and main character. So, while I was reading it, it felt lazy and ugly for that.
But while I may not like the lifeless mechanics of how Saramago writes, his story is human as well as symbolic, and it has imprinted itself onto me. He is no flashy hack, no popular potboiler writer and it's good for that. This is a story of a lowly clerk in his fifties: unmarried and quite alone in the world, consumed by his bureaucratic job at the Central Registry where he copies down records of births and deaths onto cards. What happens is that the clerk finds himself driven to discover more about the life of a woman whose record he comes upon and is randomly taken with. Perhaps this is the clerk's way of finding some connection and some adventure in a lonely life.
Saramago draws the reader in following how the clerk is compelled upon his journey including amusing anxieties and scrapes that he finds himself in, such as breaking into a school overnight, or worrying about being found out and fired from his job. The blurb makes out as if there's a love story, but there overtly isn't; only a muted love story of a different kind. I am not sure I understand the allegory and symbolism that the novel seems replete with but this is like a much more human and realistic Kafka.
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
If you want to be trapped inside the mind of a very average man on a misdemeanor-level adventure, here you go. There ARE a lot of beautifully written moments though.
Also, this was a translation. I'm not sure how the original was laid out, but this edition was a chore to read. Scarce paragraph breaks, no new lines for dialogue, no quote marks for dialogue much less indicators of who is speaking -- it kept making me re-read to make sure I knew who said what.
Or maybe all of this took place in the main characters head, and the solid bricks of text on a page are making that point visually? Either way, I don't want to work that hard right now.
Also, this was a translation. I'm not sure how the original was laid out, but this edition was a chore to read. Scarce paragraph breaks, no new lines for dialogue, no quote marks for dialogue much less indicators of who is speaking -- it kept making me re-read to make sure I knew who said what.
Or maybe all of this took place in the main characters head, and the solid bricks of text on a page are making that point visually? Either way, I don't want to work that hard right now.