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.
