Blindness by Jose Saramago

Blindness is a dystopian novel, depicting a society where a peculiar kind of white blindness is so highly contagious that practically everyone is affected by it and society discontinues to function in a civilized way. The readers are witness to the very first man that goes blind. After being helped home, and his wife’s return from work, the blind man goes to an Ophthalmologist who is baffled by this condition. Later that evening, it turns out that the patients in the waiting room and the ophthalmologist himself go blind. As the disease spreads rapidly, the diseased are quarantined. The Doctor’s wife lies that she has gone blind as well so that she may stay by her husband. Of course the quarantine is an awful place, where the corrupt patients seize control over everyone. However, the disease spread so fast that eventually the patients escape only to find a broken society with no government to facilitate, no water, no electricity, no nothing; just people living like animals, defecating and dying on the street and groping their way around to find food and survive. However, the doctor’s wife can still see and she with their close knit group are able to survive. In the end everyone can see again. The reason I told you what happened is because it’s a lame ending, and it doesn’t deserve the honor of being kept ambiguous.
Furthermore, the narration is painstaking as it has to rationalize every aspect and emotion of the character. To some extent, I believe that Saramago is just rationalizing his own fantasies. For example, at one point in the quarantine the doctor’s wife sees her husband sneaking into bed with another woman. Although she is hurt by this she is understanding and walks over there and practically gives her blessing. Like that would ever happen. At least let her pretend she didn’t see it. The doctor is lucky enough to have his wife with him (considering that she is described as pretty and obviously in obscenely patient), as so many families were split.

I also did not understand why Saramago did not use names. It is explained at one point (like everything else is, not leaving much up to the reader’s imagination), but it still didn’t make sense to me. The doctor is the doctor, his wife is the doctor’s wife, the woman he cheated on her with is the girl with dark glasses. If none of the characters in the novel can see her dark glasses, why should she be identified by them? I suppose the blindness has catapulted them into a such a different world that their names and former identities no longer apply, but it just didn’t seem relevant, especially since they are identified by aspects of their previous way of life.

I can’t say I was that enthralled with this novel, and that’s bad since I was really anticipating reading it. Perhaps my hopes were too high. I felt like an interesting idea for a plot was wasted by an over-rationalizing, third person narrative which diminished any suspense or emotion from me since it was all so thoroughly explained.

A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer depicts a common trend that was seen throughout Central America throughout the 1970’s, 80’s, and in some cases, even today. To emphasize the commonality of the regimes and coups that took place, Didion sets her story in the imaginary Central American country of Boca Grande. However, the story of the political climate is connected to the forefront of the plot in two ways: the narrator, Grace, is an American expatriate living in Boca Grande and widowed by a member of the ruling family and brings the main character, Charlotte Douglas, to life by narrating her story, and also when the coup overthrows the ruling family and Charlotte dies in the overtaking. Everything in between describes Charlotte’s marriage to an abusive alcoholic and professor of literature (who would have thought?) and to a Berkeley California lawyer, as well as her daughter’s involvement with a Marxist organization and her second, practically still-born child. During her time in Boca Grande, Charlotte is present during many meetings having to do with the overthrow of the regime, but she acts oblivious to what is going on around her. Perhaps she wanted to feel connected to her daughter without acknowledging the violence that would result.

Didion, as always, depicts the reality of the times. By depicting an American woman in Boca Grande, she is able to do so of both the Central American and American cultures, ranging from corrupt government and regimes, to the American lifestyle on many different levels represented by Charlotte’s husbands and daughter. They are all embodied in Charlotte’s character.

Although I enjoyed reading this novel, Didion’s matter-of-fact style, which I admire greatly, is better suited for her essays. I find her to be an excellent verbal photographer of her times always gathering telling snapshots of the existing range of cultures.

The Blind Assassin - by Margaret Atwood

Reading The Blind Assassin after The God of Small Things was very complementary. Both novels with a similar plot set in different cultures (Canada and India respectively): a family is traced for three generations with the first generation starting a modest company which in the second generation is challenged by the communist movement that the owners are sympathetic towards but cannot sustain the demands, and it is in the third generation that things begin to differ, well that and Atwood’s writing is far superior and less superficial. Also, alongside the story told by a daughter of the third generation, Iris, is the enigmatic novel of the Blind Assassin written by one of the siblings of the third generation. So, essentially Atwood has granted us the gift of two novels in one. Of course, The Blind Assassin depicts a part of the narrator’s life that she does not feel comfortable explaining as fact in her life story, but implies only subtly. Even though the plots differ by the time we reach the third generation, there are some striking similarities: the issue of class and marriage and forbidden love interests.

Although the book is long it moves at a quick pace and is not stunted by overly descriptive writing as it is in Roy’s novel. The characters are believable even though their situation is unusual.

One theme that is gently weaved into the book, yet holds a strong presence is that of God and religion. My favorite quotation regarding the theme: “A paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used – metaphorically, of course – to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?” The belief in God shows up in different forms and varieties among the many characters in the novel. Iris, the narrator and the one responsible for the quotation above, obviously is not a believer. Her sister Laura is a believer in the essence of God; she does not allow the superficial aspects of organized religion to interfere with her behavior and acts in a way that is peculiarly honest. In a sense this makes her so pure and innocent that she is exempt from carrying any of the burdens of the family and they all fall on Iris. Reenie, a woman who looks after them and manages the house, although good at heart also believes in God, but in an institutional sense as well; she often cares about how certain behaviors appear to the community and gossips as many religious people do. However, Reenie is a moral character and a pillar for the two sisters.

The different forms of belief extend to other secondary and tertiary characters as well. I do think that the way each character decided to believe in God has an indirect impact on their fate since essentially it determines their outlook on life. Laura’s disappointments in human nature are earth shattering and drive her to suicide, Iris’s practical atheism is what makes her a perfect candidate for taking on the family’s burdens, and Reenie’s well-rounded approach to life results in a normal family, yet she does contradict her own “Christian morals” by becoming pregnant before wedlock.

Atwood has created an honest, intelligent, beautifully written, and entertaining novel. It’s a book for all lovers of literature!

A Dance With Dragons - George R.R. Martin

The latest installment in the series, and in the interest of avoiding spoilers and redundancy, I'll not summarize or talk about the plot lines. But there is something about this book that irks me, although the irritation it inspires is different in kind than the one produced by its immediate precursor, A Feast for Crows, which was an overlong and overwrought chapter in the larger story. A Dance With Dragons is in fact of equivalent quality to the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, but it does not rise up to the excellence of the first and third books, A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords, respectively. And yet they all share the same fatal flaw, which, in the end might not be a flaw at all; namely, there is no end. It seems silly to view the series as a whole in critical terms until it's complete, and so you're left with mindless wondering about how the story will eventually unfold.

Although I can't help mindlessly speculate that the theme of the books will eventually be: Blood tells. Which is abhorrent, yet par for the course in the epic high fantasy genre, although I had hoped that Martin was trying to undermine this tired trope.

The Passion Artist - John Hawkes

Would it be necessary to pursue fleeing women into those ravished buildings? Would inmates and volunteers grapple with each other in dark rooms where ordinarily and under lock and key these same women slept during their endless and unnatural nights? In the midst of his fellows and standing inside the walls of La Violaine at last, suddenly he began to feel that he recognized the yard, the buildings, the catacombs and labyrinths of this world of women, as if he too were a prisoner in this very place and had always been so.
-pg 50 (Dalkey Archive ed)

The man referred to here is Konrad Vost, a widower who lives in a nameless city attached to a large women's prison called La Violaine. Vost lives an unremarkable life marked more by routine and habit than anything else, and aside from the demands of work and keeping his spare house in order for the sake of his daughter, he makes a daily visit to a cafe across from the prison, which is also called La Violaine, where the husbands and relatives of the incarcerated women all wait, each day, more as a ritual act of devotion than out of any expectation that their wives, daughters, or mothers will be freed. The woman for whom Vost waits is his mother, who is serving time for murdering Vost's father.

The only remarkable aspect of Vost's life is that it is defined by women, and not only by their mere absence or presence in his life, but also by their transgressions against him. His mother kills his father, his wife sleeps with another man, and, as the narrative unfolds, we find out that his daughter, far from being the perfect picture of a young student, has taken up prostitution. Later on, we come to find out that Vost's entire life has been one of suffered indignity at the hands of women, but in the story it is his daughter's turn toward prostitution that seems to jolt him into action. As soon as he finds out, he haplessly hires one of his daughter's schoolmates, who is a prostitute as well, and that marks the beginning of Vost's initial transformation into a man who is striving against the power that women seem to have had over his entire life.

After his tryst with the girl, the women in the prison riot, revolt and take control of the prison, forcing the men in the city to organize a response. Vost joins in and takes part in the battle for the prison, trading sex for violence in his struggle against women, and the violent and sex-filled narrative that follows is a peculiar odyssey of discovery and revelation, wherein Vost comes to understand and break free of the prison of his misogyny.

Thematically, the book runs the risk of being precious, or pat, but it is the way in which it is told that allows the book its modest success; Hawkes's nightmare-dread prose is operating at the same high caliber you would expect if you had read any of his other books. The physicality of the theme and the action matches well with his sensual style, and the horror intrinsic in his internal life is heightened by the dream-like quality of his writing. But, and there always seems to be a but for me when speaking of Hawkes, the book is not one of the best of his that I have read, and even the prose seems not to rise as high in its achievement as it does in, say, The Beetle Leg or The Lime Twig. Nevertheless, I know of no other book that treats the subject of misogyny so frighteningly, and Vost's strange cast of mind becomes, by the end, entirely familiar, even if its starting point of upended gender roles seems so alien at the beginning.

The God of Small Thing by Arundhati Roy

This is a book that I have begun many times but just recently pushed myself to finish! The story itself is wonderfully constructed; it has a gripping plot and the narrative is masterfully structured. In this story, Arundhati Roy unfolds the many layers of history belonging to a prominent Indian family in Ayemenem. The family has achieved its prominence through a pickling company founded by the grandmother. This factory becomes a central stronghold for the communist party, and even though the present owner of the factory, the son, is sympathetic to the worker’s needs, he is unable to meet their demands. This cleverly reveals the political climate of India while also tracing the family’s rise and fall.


The rise and fall of the family is also determined by the actions of the family members themselves. The narrative (3rd person) is structured in such a way so that the reader knows what will happen, but not quite how. Certain images from the story are woven in repeatedly before the event even takes place. In this sense the unfolding of the narrative is truly masterful, where the climax does not depend on the action itself because we are familiar with it, but at the exposure of the true personalities of the characters whence the events are properly described to us, some are hopeless, some helpless, but the most shocking character is cunningly and frighteningly evil.

Although the narrative is impressive, it must be said that the writing itself is abhorrently pretentious. The most concise example I can give is Roy’s use of similes. She uses them very liberally to the extent where two similes may be matched to one comparison. Automatically one way which Roy could improve her writing is by using only one simile per comparison. I have no idea why her editor did not think of that. Secondly, some similes were such far reaches and served no literary purpose. For example, she compares the permanence of something to government jobs. Being Greek, I know first-hand what that means, but it just didn’t fit in with the atmosphere of the novel. I understand that she is trying to emphasize the social and political climate of India, but she should save it for another novel rather than polluting this superbly structured story with useless words. I caught myself rolling my eyes many times while reading this novel.

If you can ignore the obnoxious similes and the other superfluous language that is pungent like perfume in the duty free stores of frantic and sleepless airports filled with bodies moving at different paces or like the intoxicating smell of diesel gas that somehow seeps into the car, even on cold days when the windows are rolled up tight to prevent the cold from biting, then I say read it because it is a meaningful story.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.

The book is subtitled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, and here Ryder takes a step back from the story that he has been telling, essentially to himself, to reinforce Waugh's theme of the peculiar nature of the grace of the Catholic god, and of the unbeliever coming into the fold. This brief quotation combines several of the book's more notable features; that the narrative of events occurs almost entirely in the past, remembered by Charles Ryder; that the author uses elaborate metaphors and is capable of pulling them off quite beautifully; the wry misdirection of phrases such as 'for we possess nothing certainly except the past,' which litter the novel like a false trail of breadcrumbs. The inclusion of St. Mark's is no accident, nor is the broken biscuit in the mouth, and the deft circling around from the image of memories as a flock of angels that draw the mind to higher things to the image of startled and startling flock of pigeons leaving St. Mark's square bare underlines the economy of both Waugh's prose as well as his thematic dexterity.

The book begins with Charles Ryder serving as an officer during World War II, coincidentally stationed at the family seat of his estranged childhood friend Sebastian Flyte, and the location turns Ryder's thoughts to when he first met Sebastian when attending university. The narrative then begins in earnest, with Ryder recounting his dissolute university days, his meeting the Flyte family, the descent of Sebastian into a rather pure state of alcoholism. Later, Ryder moves on to describe the tragedy of his own life, wherein he marries and becomes a successful architectural painter, only to find himself in love with Sebastian's sister, Julia, who is married, as well. They have an affair, going so far as to break off their marriages, but in the end, it does not end well.

Or doesn't it? Despite the somber tone of the tale, and Ryder's eventual ostensibly lonely end, there is, hidden beneath the narrative, the theme of conversion that comes to life in the end. It is a flaw, a flaw that this book shares with some Graham Greene novels; namely, that the story seems to be of secondary concern, and that it is the Catholicism that matters. To be clear, it is not the fact that the book's theme is religious that irks me, it is that it is so deviously slipped in. The above quotation, which I think truly gets to the heart of the book beneath its attempts at misdirection, is followed by this passage, where Ryder is thinking on the memories of those moments that rise above the unremarkable moments that make up most lives:

The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves--the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, outdistance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we a have a secret we shall never share.

I can't help but think that this novel would have been better had Charles Ryder kept that secret in his breast, locked away, and that Waugh kills the subtlety of his theme by hitting it, right at the end, on the head.