by José Saramago, Margaret Jull Costa
I tried. I really did. I adore Henry James. I'm not against verbosity. But I need more dialog, and more action. It took me 3 sessions to get 45 pages in and I gave up. Sorry. I'm sure it's profound or something, but I'm giving it a miss.
I listened to this so I would not have to deal with the lack of punctuation, and yet the never-ending sentences were still unavoidable. On and on and on with lists of details that I found boring. This is a philosophical treatise, or should I say pure sophistry?! Yes, I get what the author is saying ...
I enjoyed this quite a bit despite the typos to be found at every turn in the Kindle edition (not the fault of the author, just a sloppy post-OCR conversion review) and the author's peculiar handling of dialogue, which turned the book into huge, never-ending blocks of text. But I'm a sucker for this...
Okay, Jose. I really wanted to like you and it's not that I think you're a bad writer. To the contrary, you are quite the excellent writer. It's just that your style isn't really for me. The long, laborious sentences, the lack of dialogue, the imperceptible movement of the plot. I'm sorry, I just co...
Really liked this book. In its whimsical, quiet way, it is a nice affirmation of human connection.
In this novel we follow Senor Jose, a clerk at the Central Registry (where all births, marriages, and deaths are noted) who suddenly decides to track down a woman whose card of information strikes him for some reason. The search takes this lonely 50-something man into terrain for which he is not pre...
Not quite as engaging as Saramago's BLINDNESS, but still damn good. The intrigue is all in the concept with this book, the way the setting is built up in a metaphysical way. The protagonist works in a literal space of the living and the dead, organizing, which comments nicely on his slow investment ...
What is it about clerks that they so often attract the attentions of writers? Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Kafka. I don't know - their anonymity? their existence as functionaries?, they love them. This is the story of one of my favorite clerks in literature (Wemmick from _Great Expectations_ being th...
Log in with Facebook 
