{"id":2448,"date":"2010-07-06T21:18:59","date_gmt":"2010-07-06T11:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=2448"},"modified":"2010-07-07T07:08:24","modified_gmt":"2010-07-06T21:08:24","slug":"tfw-book-club-r-i-p-jose-saramago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=2448","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P Jose Saramago"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I was saddened to hear about the recent passing of the author Jose Saramago.<\/p>\n

Saramago was a Nobel prize-winning writer who was hugely popular in his home country of Portugal where it was reported that some 20,000 people attended his funeral (!) when he was buried last week.\u00a0 He had a good innings, living to the ripe old age of 87.<\/p>\n

Which was not to say Saramago wasn’t active in the later years of his life.\u00a0 In fact, he only actually gained international fame in his mid-fifties and didn’t write some of his most widely recognised works until he was in his Seventies.\u00a0 Even at the end, he was still active.\u00a0 I was actually only a few weeks shy of seeing him attend the Edinburgh Book Festival in August.<\/p>\n

A devisive character, Saramago was an outspoken atheist and active member of the Portugese Communist Party who managed to upset the Catholic community in his country on a regular basis and so much so that they had at one stage attempted to block his writing from competing for Eurpoean Literary Prize.\u00a0 His political and spiritual beliefs often provide an interesting context to the content in his books.<\/p>\n

Personally, I credit one of Saramago’s most widely read books, Blindness<\/em>, for getting me back into regular reading after I had gone through something of a dry spell.\u00a0 It tells the story of a country which suddenly experiences a mass epidemic of blindness where, with the sole exception of an unnamed doctor’s wife, everyone loses their vision and can only see a ‘sea of milky white’.\u00a0 The story follows the experiences of several strangers who are herded into an asylum as the government tries unsuccessfully to contain the spread of blindness.\u00a0 The group struggle with the increasingly poor living conditions, hygiene and degrading morality of those that they are locked in with.<\/p>\n

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Blindness: ignore the crappy film adaptation and read the book, you mugs!<\/p><\/div>\n

Blindness<\/em> is written in Saramago’s trademark style.\u00a0 On his biography on Wikipedia, it rather cheekily states that Saramago didn’t finish grammar school.\u00a0 No kidding!\u00a0 He writes in a highly experimental style where he has no time for commas, quotation marks, paragraphs, character names or capitalization.\u00a0 Effectively the book is a rather imposing wall of text that goes on, page after page.\u00a0 And yet they are still effortlessly readable due to Saramago’s affable and colourful narrative in which he describes the events as if he were a storyteller around a campfire.<\/p>\n

Since finishing my last book, Kafka on the Shore<\/em> by Haruki Murakami, I had once again entered into a bit of a lull, struggling to find something to read that would hold my interest.\u00a0 Saramago’s passing gave me the idea to try another one of his titles.\u00a0 I settled on another tale with a rather fantastic concept.\u00a0 This time, a country wakes up on New Years Day to find the complete absense of death.\u00a0 It tells the story of how the country deals with the political, religious and social ramifications of immortality, particularly as the circle of life continues on in other countries.\u00a0 It’s called Death In Intervals<\/em> and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.<\/p>\n

R.I.P\u00a0 Jose Saramago
\n16 November 1922 \u2013 18 June 2010<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was saddened to hear about the recent passing of the author Jose Saramago. Saramago was a Nobel prize-winning writer who was hugely popular in his home country of Portugal where it was reported that some 20,000 people attended his funeral (!) when he was buried last week.\u00a0 He had a good innings, living to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,230],"tags":[574],"class_list":["post-2448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-book-club","tag-jose-saramago"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2448"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2452,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448\/revisions\/2452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}