A review by tessaays
Raised from the Ground by José Saramago

2.0

I gave up on this most of the way through it, after basically dreading each time I opened it up to read. That’s not to say this book is entirely without grace, humour or lyricism - it has those in spades. I just found the pace unbearably slow, and the style really challenging (most sentences are half a page to a page long, which makes it hard to stay focused on what’s happening and who’s speaking). I didn’t think the style added anything to the story. I also didn’t understand why it took three-quarters of the book (or even more) to reach the rebellion. The blurb emphasises the communist revolution as the sort of narrative tipping point, so I expected that to kick off about a quarter of the way through. Instead you have 300 pages on the drudgery of extreme poverty to wade through first (and remember, no full stops). By the time I got to the interesting stuff I was already so tired of this book that I gave up.
In summary - I loved Blindness, but this was absolutely not it.