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Friday, July 11th, 2008
Saramago is very clearly conscious of what he is doing with our clichés, what I was talking about yesterday: Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life.
He may be permitted one more. He uncovers the veins of meaning over which these phrases have calcified.
posted evening of July 11th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, July 10th, 2008
That was when Cipriano Algor said, Don't worry, we'll get there on time, I'm not worried, replied his son-in-law, only just managing to conceal his anxiety, Of course you're not, but you know what I mean, said Cipriano Algor. ...Cipriano Algor started up the van. He had got distracted by the buildings under demolition and now wanted to make up for lost time, a ridiculous expression if ever there was one, an absurd idiom with which we hope to disguise the harsh fact that no time once lost can ever be made up or recovered, as if we believed, contrary to this evident truth, that the time we thought forever lost might, after all, have decided to hang back and wait, with the patience of one who has all the time in the world, for us to notice its absence. The Cave has been sitting on my shelf for a little while now begging to be read; finally this afternoon I heeded its call and brought it along, on the train ride to the city. (I met Sylvia and Ellen to listen to Deedee reading some wonderful, funny memoirs.)Saramago's prose pulls me along like nothing else -- the onrush of words won't let me go. It reminds me a little of Gaddis' style, except I think Saramago does it much more successfully than Gaddis. The length of sentences forces you as a reader to keep more context in mind at any moment; but it is not a brute-force thing. The timing is just exquisite, the way each sentence moves through phases: building, droning, falling, building, and the sudden surprising punch of the period. (This is of course partly a testament to the abilities of the translator, Margaret Jull Costa.) Also: I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but I'm really taken with Saramago's ability to transform clichéed adages into profound, surprising truths, simply by exploring their implications.
posted evening of July 10th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, June 30th, 2008
 I met Ellen and Sylvia for dinner this evening in Montclair -- Sylvia started art camp at the Montclair Art Museum today, where she is happily learning how to draw animals. In one of her classes they are doing a group project, a sculpture of Huckleberry Finn -- Sylvia has never read it, so while we were eating we decided to swing by our favorite bookstore and pick up a copy... of course it is hard to leave there without a bunch of books. Our haul:
- Huckleberry Finn
- Tom Sawyer -- nice to have this on hand for when she's read Huck Finn -- it is a lesser book of course, but I remember it being a fun read.
- The Prince and the Pauper, to round out the kid-friendly Twain selections.
- The Golden Compass -- people keep recommending this to me; I should take a look. Sylvia is loving the Harry Potter books these days, and this seemed like it would be in a similar vein.
- Teddy Roosevelt -- Sylvia's pick (after she found out that no, we're not buying Dragonology today), from a series of biographies of important Americans. Teddy Roosevelt is, she explained, her favorite president: I'm not totally clear on whether this is because 26 is her favorite number, or vice versa.
- The Cave -- my pick.
posted evening of June 30th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, June 21st, 2008
I've really enjoyed Dr. Holbo's couple of recent posts about Plato's cave allegory, and I was happy to read today that Saramago has a novel about (or "which touches on") the allegory -- it is his The Cave, translated in 2002.
posted evening of June 21st, 2008: Respond
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