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(...)'

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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.'

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