"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