"La Balsa de Piedra" - José Saramago (19 Feb - 29 Mar)

Well this one has taken especially long to write because of "life" and stuff... But here it is. Finally, "La Balsa de Piedra".

Unsurprisingly, I also took a while reading this one. Started mid-February and finished it late-April. I'm not going to keep blaming dissertation writing and university stuff for this, rather Saramago's jumpy way of intertwining the characters' stories with the omniscient narrator that gets side-tracked all the time. This doesn't make it any less enjoyable, mind you, I find a lot of his social commentary incredibly engaging and sharp, it's just that it takes a while to get into the story because sometimes the narrator's own voice seems more important than the characters'. I will, however, blame university stuff for taking so long to write this.

Now, if there is one thing I take from this novel, is that we really are all cosmonauts wandering aimlessly through space, the very existence of humankind doomed to end at some point due to the fact that about 4 billion years into the future, the Milky Way is expected to collide with the Andromeda galaxy. Yet we go on with our lives because this is so alien and far away that it seems irrelevant. But the destiny of the Iberian Peninsula is a condensed representation of the same, and it is only when people see the end coming that they are jolted into action of some kind. This comparison with the fate of our galaxy is explicitly mentioned once in the novel, but of course the point of it all is to explore how people would spend what they perceive as their last days/months/years faced with the unexpected, and I found that a beautiful journey because it tries to rescue the little things in times of uncertainty.

This discussion around "the meaning of it all" reminds me a lot of a book I've started and dropped about four times now: "Maya", by Jostein Gaarder. The first few times I abandoned it because I would spend more time looking up Norwegian words than actually reading it. I started it again a few weeks ago, and I managed more than half the book, but despaired once again on a more philosophical basis: it asks the question of "why the bloody hell do we exist at all" way too bluntly, and at this point in life, I can't really afford to get lost in such thoughts.

But there is of course so much more to "La Balsa de Piedra". One of the questions I liked is how much people can and should actually get to know one another to base their decisions:

 "If in order to like someone, one had to wait to get to know that person, not even a lifetime would suffice" says Joana Carda to Jose Anaico.

Funny that this seemed to be a recurrent thought in some of the books we've read for this list... I know I've mentioned it before, I remember Toru Okada asks himself a similar question (but on a more pessimistic note) in "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle".

I really enjoyed how clueless some of the men were at points like this, and how much the women took matters into their own hands. Very much like back in Latin America, even. Cultural resonance, I suppose.

Though I can't say I sympathized more with a particular character - I think I often don't - maybe because of Saramago's own ever-present voice and wit:

"Opinions are but the apparently rationalized expressions of taste."

 Once, in conversation with a Colombian bookworm very close to my family, she said something that I believe was Saramago's own expression about his critics, shortly before he passed away:

(paraphrasing) - "At the beginning [of his literary career], they used to say 'oh Saramago is good, but he's a communist'. Now they say 'oh Saramago is a communist, but he's good'"

Even though yes, of course there is a lot of political commentary, I get the impression that he was too self-conscious to be easily classifiable one way or other. After all, both novels I've read by him are more centred around individual people and their unlikely circumstances, instead of larger societal questions. I think that's one thing I really like about him: the individual stories matter, and make up the whole.

And again, if we had to wait for an academic committee to confirm our beliefs through infallibly proven empirical data, or for an "expert in problems" to define what a problem is, or to get to know all the antics and misgivings of one we love to know for sure we are willing to spend a lifetime together, I'm sure the raft would dismember on a coral reef before we had a chance to taste the proverbial lover’s lips.

On that note, a song to wrap it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM8t29gD8J8

La balsa de piedra by José Saramago, 08.01-04.03 (first 32 pages), 04.03-23.03 (remaining 300 pages) by Sunniva

Yes, man. I finished it. I've never spent this amount of time on a book without picking up other books inbetween, because I can often read several books at once, if they have different purposes (breakfast book, mid-day book, late-at-night-book) or I find one challenging to read. Now, I really haven't, apart from reading a few pages of Dracula every time I go swimming (because I am made of logic), and reading Meg Eier Ingen during the film festival, during which I also ignored this book completely.

I struggled for a long time (almost two months), keeping the book by my bed, taking it down to the living room and writing a letter instead, checking Facebook and reading blogs and tidying up the desktop on my computer. I also brought my tiny Spanish dictionary with me, seeing that there were a lot of words I was uncertain about, and plenty I'd never seen before, and oh! the conjugations.

The book starts off talking about different people, doing slightly unorthodox things or having them happen, all while throwing in comments about Greek mythology, dogs and whatnot. I found it very confusing to begin with, although now that I look back, I can see that all the five main characters are introduced in the first chapter, that is, the first nine pages, and it is actually very concise.

At the beginning of March, I just realised that I had to pull myself together, to be able to finish by the end of the month, and so I've been reading between ten and twenty pages each day, and I'm allowing myself to feel proud of that.

Obviously, I've been skipping words or sentences I do not understand – that is, I have read them once and moved on.

If we remove the frustration of understanding that there is a joke, a political comment or a social one, and not understanding why it's funny or whether it's important, I have thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I need to read more of his works, if I can only decide which language to read them in.

My one disappointment was that I thought Saramago would be a feminist, after this comment:

'A toda prisa, los hombres de informacion, algunos de los cuales eran mujeres(...)'

p.24

but then I realised that he was having more fun with the language than making a comment. Later on in the book, there are so many examples of Joana Carda and Maria Guavaira making the food and the beds and making everything comfortable, making a home, cleaning up and so on, that I just couldn't believe it. I can't excuse it either, seeing that it is quite a recent book, unlike The Day of the Triffids.

Even though the women are strong characters, they conform to far too many clichés.

That said. I love the conversations in this book, even though they can be hard to follow, with only a capital letter signifying a different speaker, and commas are used instead of any other punctuation marks. People have brilliant conversations as well.

HERE COME THE SPOILERS

My soul fell apart when I read about the lonesome sailor. I didn't see it coming, even though everything had been laid out in advance. That is another thing about this book, Saramago is very good at preparing the story, all while you're not paying attention. The same thing happened when Pedro Orce met Roque Lozano, or that is, he let Roque Lozano meet the other two men a few hundred pages before, so he could be there in the end.

Talking about Pedro Orce. WHAT. Seriously. I didn't understand what happened the first time I read that Maria Guavaira followed him into the forest. WHY. I understand that he was lonely. But couldn't they have foreseen all the pain and awkwardness that they were creating? And Pedro Orce was left even more lonely than before, with a lessened friendship with the other men. This made no sense to me. Although, Joana Carda's decision to follow up on Maria Guavaira's act, was a good one, I think, because it made them both guilty – as Saramago says at one point, changing it from being an exception into being something regular. Almost. I could really have done without this. I suppose it was partly there to show that not all the decisions these people made were for the best, because throughout the rest of the book, they pretty much make all the right decisions.

Again, I know that I read all books far too literally (ironically enough). I laughed at the comments about the White House and the United States and how and why they were willing to help. I enjoyed the little stabs at Spain that came from this Portuguese author. There were doubtless points I missed, especially that long passage about poets was completely lost on me. What I enjoyed about the book is that it encompassed all of this, but also what the inscription in my copy says: friendship, dreams and solidarity.

'(..)queremos pronunciar la palabra final y nos damos cuenta de que ya habíamos vuelto a principio.'

p.320

Saramago, José. La balsa de piedra. 1987. Editorial Seix Barral, Barcelona.

"Invisible Cities" - Italo Calvino (7-21 Dec)

I'm not too sure what I expected after reading "If on a winter's night a traveller...", but it certainly wasn't this.

One thing I liked about that one was the puzzle-like way it was written in, kind of like "The Solitaire Mystery", together with the smoked-up reflections on what it is to read, write, and simultaneously being part of the made-up narrative that is life. "Invisible Cities" was definitely much more loose, and more of an expressionistic way of talking about a city, or cities. Or the world. Or everything, as according to Calvino, it seems, everything relevant to human history can be learned by remembering, looking at, or imagining a city.

As usual, with a book without much of a plot, it took me a while to ease myself into it, but this one I ended up enjoying, and as the interlude-like conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan began to take shape - or rather, to more explicitly lose it in clear directions - things began to click together.

To begin with, there was the expanding conversation about language. It wasn't long before I realized that these two personas might not have actually been talking at all. Not just because they openly say something along the lines of "this moment might not be real", but because they bring up the illusion of communication all the time. While Marco Polo learns new languages through his (imagined?) travels, presumably being able to make himself more and more clear, I kept wondering more and more whether these cities were actually the ones he imagined. Suddenly, this comes to mind, especially the last verse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11uI-uy33uU

So it's not so much about what is told, but about the whole impression of the book:

- Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."

- Polo answers: "Without stones, there is no arch."

Pretty straightforward wisdom at first, if you ask me: no man is an island, we're all connected, of course. But I think they're not just talking about "the arch of human history/society", they're also talking about smaller things, like telling a story; the way you react to a certain comment; why your orange juice tastes funny right after brushing your teeth, which leaves a sense of disappointment in your mouth that lingers throughout your morning and keeps you from fully enjoying the cup of coffee you will have between your morning lectures, making you fall asleep halfway through the second one and thus feeling extremely embarrassed at your lecturer, because she's also your dissertation supervisor and oh gosh, you've already asked her to write you a recommendation letter for a postgraduate programme at Oxford University and... Well...

"It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear." Which I think applies on two levels: we read others' stories filling them with our own experiences or expectations; at the same time we arrange our own histories in the order that seems to suit us best - the ear, here, being whatever is in our best interest, how we want to see ourselves.

A couple of the cities seemed riven with Christian morality. The description of one of them struck me as strongly sexist (the "inhabitants" would cyclically take up different "wives").  Another few seemed plagued with a straightforward consumerist ethos. Some others were interestingly mystical and made me think that Borges' library was actually hidden in there. One of them reminded me particularly of Caracas - one of the most grim ones. But then again, maybe I've made this particular impression of Caracas feel like all of Caracas to me, as an excuse for me to be disgusted by it. Maybe that's just me being smug and justifying the desires that draw me in other directions.

But as the last passage reminds me way too much of this:

http://italian.about.com/library/anthology/dante/blinferno003.htm

I can't help but taking the very closing line as sound advice I shall carry close to heart.