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Monday, September 15th, 2008
As so often happens, I find myself confused about church teaching. (It is not my church, but I always seem to understand Christianity less well than I think I do or think I should.) Near the beginning of Death with Interruptions, the prime minister gives a pompous and meaningless speech which ends with an invocation of God: "We will accept the body's immortality, he exclaimed in exalted tones, if that is the will of god, to whom we will always offer our grateful prayers for having chosen the good people of this country as his instrument." A little bit later, the Cardinal phones him, quite angry at his implication that God would will the destruction of the body: "You admitted the possibility that the immortality of the body might be the will of god, and one doesn't need a doctorate in transcendental logic to realize that it comes down to the same thing." I've got to be missing something here; everything I've taken away from reading about Christianity suggests that it's a fundamental tenet, that God wills the destruction of flesh in general and that God willed his own demise in the particular case of the crucifixion. So I'm kind of struggling here to figure out what Saramago has in mind.
 Update: Thanks to correspondence with badger and his friend Bill, I am starting to see the error of my ways. Bill identifies my statement that "God wills the destruction of flesh in general and that God willed his own demise in the particular case of the crucifixion" as Gnostic doctrine, not Christian. I think I'm fundamentally confused about the nature of death in Christian thinking -- I was building off the statement that "to dust you shall return" to get that God was willing the destruction of flesh; but apparently the doctrine of eventual Reincarnation means that the flesh is not destroyed. (I thought when the Cardinal said "without death there can be no resurrection" that he was referring to Christ's resurrection but now it seems like he was talking about the end-times resurrection of the faithful, something that was totally slipping my mind before.) Bill also notes that "Knowing Saramago, though, he's not above having ecclesiastical figures
spout nonsense."
posted evening of September 15th, 2008: Respond
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Guess what the mailman just dropped through the hole in my front door? It is José Saramago's newly* translated Death with Interruptions. Happy! I have been reading a couple of posts over the last few days where people name D.F. Wallace as their favorite (sadly no longer) living author, which sort of thing always makes me wonder whether I have an identifiable favorite; and I think right at the moment, the answer is clearly yes, and that my favorite living author is Saramago. My tastes change of course; I had never even read any Saramago before last winter, so he is a recently acquired favorite. Perhaps this time next year I will have found a new fad. But for the moment I feel pretty strongly about specifying him as the living writer who speaks most directly to me. Before I even open the covers: this is a beautiful volume. Love the black field, the ghostly moth. The epigraph is from Wittgenstein; I don't know where it is taken from and Google is not helping me, presumably because of translation issues: If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields. This is making me flash on the discussion of Wallace over the past few days, but possibly just because I've got Wallace on the brain... There is another epigraph, from the Book of Predictions: "We will know less and less what it means to be human." I'm not sure if this is a reference to The Book of Predictions published in 1980 (which I've never heard of before just now), or something else, perhaps something internal to the story. In any case it sounds like a valid prediction. Well it's getting to be a long post about a book which I have not even started reading. I will close with the opening sentence of the story: The following day, no one died.
 *I actually think it was translated about 6 months ago and published in the UK, under the title Death at Intervals; but it is just this week available in the US. I'm assuming the two editions must be pretty similar outside the titles.
posted evening of September 15th, 2008: 3 responses
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Monday, September 8th, 2008
Not as a medicine, but it is one of the richest springs from which the spirit can drink.  Perhaps it can't do great things for the body, but the soul needs literature like the mouth needs bread. Literature is fortunately to hand -- Saramago has published a new book! The title is The Elephant's Journey; it is the story of the elephant Solomon, who in the 1500's travelled from Lisbon to Vienna. (This is what the article says; I'm presuming before that, he had also been transported from northern Africa to Lisbon.) It is not translated yet. And I have yet to read his most recently translated book, Death With Interruptions, about the problems of immortality. Saramago is also in the news calling for Spain and Portugal to unite in a single nation under the name Iberia. Not sure what to make of this.
posted evening of September 8th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, August 28th, 2008
Via the magic of Google, I just found out that a band I never heard of, Elysian Fields, has a song (without lyrics) called "Dog of Tears." I guess there's no way it could be anything other than a reference to Blindness. Busy, busy, busy! I will listen to it later on.
posted morning of August 28th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, August 24th, 2008
 The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is really making me think I need to learn more about the history of the Spanish Civil War. This looks like a good book; anyone got recommendations based on more than searching on Amazon for keywords? Leave them in comments please. Also I will stop by the used book store this afternoon and browse around their history section.
posted morning of August 24th, 2008: 7 responses
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Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Picture (from Wikipædia) is the statue of Adamastor in Lisbon -- it is on the bench across from here that our hero Ricardo Reis spends much of his time sitting. How lovely! Man, I could look at that for a long time.
Adamastor is a god from the poem Os Lusíades by Camões, which is Portugal's national epic . Adamastor also appears in Pessoa's poem "O Mostrengo" ("The Monster"), which is online here with a translation I can't vouch for*, and which inspired an animation you can watch on MeFeedia. "O Mostrengo" was the inspiration for D.S. Maguni's "O Gigante Adamastor", written for the Mozambiquan rebel cause in the 1970's.
 Another view of the statue is at Flickr. (Or possibly the Wiki pic is a cropped detail of that graphic -- they certainly look very similar layouts.) * The translator says, "This page is solely intended to entice the students of Portuguese who may, through it, be tempted to have a go at Mensagem." The page has links to the full text of Mensagem and notes.
posted evening of August 20th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
Here are a few of the things that moved me while I was reading The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis this weekend: My dear Fernando, choose your words carefully, you put yourself at great risk of being absurd. If we do not say all words, however absurd, we will never say the essential words. This is really striking -- I can imagine it outside any novel, in big letters on the wall. Certainly a thought to revisit from time to time. (A nice justification for blogging!)
 Do you regret having written it. There is nothing more pointless in this world than regret, people who express it merely want to be forgiven, then they fall back into their weakness, for each of us, deep down, continues to take pride in his weakness. This is almost a commonplace, but I think the bit about pride renders it original. I am making no declaration of love, But you are. We are exchanging greetings, sprigs of flowers, it is true that they are pretty, I mean the flowers, but they are cut, they will soon wilt, they are unaware of this and we pretend not to notice. My flowers I place in water, and will watch them until the colors fade. Then you will not watch them long. Now I am watching you. I am no flower. You are a man, I am capable of knowing the difference. A tranquil man, who sits on a riverbank watching what the current carries past, perhaps waiting for himself to be swept away. This works extremely well as poetry, but it kind of highlights my trouble with the book, which is that the characters are not fully realized as people -- they seem like puppets mouthing this dialog. (The bit about sitting on the riverbank reminds me of Snufkin, from Jansson's Moomin series.)
↻...done
posted evening of August 19th, 2008: Respond
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Counter to prediction, I did not finish The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis this weekend. I am however moving a bit closer to writing a summing-up post. My thoughts are moving in this kind of a direction: the book is beautiful and full of powerful original thought; but I have two complaints. First is a complaint with myself; I am not equipt to understand this book. Specifically I don't know Pessoa's poetry more than a little bit; I know hardly anything about Portuguese history, classical nor modern (I didn't know until I started reading this book, that "Lusitanian" means "Portuguese", nor until I looked it up just now that that is because Lusitania was the province of the Roman empire which included modern Portugal -- this just by way of example); and I don't know enough about the history of Europe in the years leading up to the second World War. A full understanding of this book seems like it would require pretty close acquaintance with these three fields. But insofar as I do understand the book: it seems to lack the focus and intensity of Saramago's later fiction. He spends a lot of time on Reis' character but it is still cryptic to me; Reis' self-absorption seems pretty reprehensible but I don't have any window on how he justifies it to himself. And his relationships with Lydia and with Marcenda are not touching me. So but anyway: Still reading it, still loving it, with caveats. Later on this evening I will post some of the meaningful bits I've been reading and thinking about this weekend.
posted afternoon of August 19th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, August 15th, 2008
 Sorry about the lack of updates recently... someday soon I will start thinking about posting blog entries! I am loving Ricardo Reis, I think I will finish it this weekend, not sure what I will read next.
I am nearly done fixing READIN to be compatible with HostMonster, still just a couple of things to do -- like I can't post "What's of Interest" items on the sidebar, or update the blogroll, at least not consistently.* Timeline for finishing this is Tuesday, when I will have some free time and Internet access.
We are going away for a long weekend, to a place without Internet or even much of a cellular network -- and yet it is nearby! in northern Bucks County, PA -- and spend a few days relaxing. See you Tuesday!
 * If I could do these things, I would have: Added A History of New York to the blogroll, under "Literati"; updated Matthew Yglesias' link to point to his new site; posted an "of Interest" item that today is the anniversary of the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert. Without arena rock, we would not have Kansas, Styx, REO Speedwagon! Also, I would add a link under "Comix" to Bad Gods, which I see is publishing again.
↻...done
posted morning of August 15th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, August 14th, 2008
For several minutes he watched his courage desert him, it was like watching sand run through an hourglass, an overworked metaphor which nevertheless keeps recurring. One day, when we live two hundred years and ourselves become the hourglass observing the sand inside it, we will not need the metaphor, but life is too short to indulge in such thoughts...
This chapter, in which Ricardo's relationship with Marcenda moves a little closer to passion and Ricardo's relationship with Lydia moves a little closer to being taken for granted, has me wondering, why are all of the characters' actions so clearly marked as male or as female. Ricardo walking around Lisbon and around his room is identified as male -- "It is indeed true that a man on his own is useless" -- Lydia is identified as having a woman's eye (more specifically a female domestic servant's eye) for what needs to be cleaned up in Ricardo's room -- the nameless people in the rooms and buildings around them are doing things as husbands, wives, fathers, mothers.I've been noticing all along that gender plays a very important role in this narrative; fortuitously I read a post today at Is there no sin in it? which touched on the subject of "gender performance," how characters on TV shows act out their genders. I'd heard the term before but this was a very useful reminder -- it gives me a name for the way the characters in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis are being depicted. I believe tentatively that gender performance, possibly interlocking with performance of Portuguese identity and of social class, is a major part of the meaning of this novel.
There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.
(Well, and to be sure there is a lot more going on than just gender or just gender and class and ethnicity.)
posted evening of August 14th, 2008: Respond
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