aozora blogspot

i attended my first book club meeting last night. due to the difficulty of the book, we pushed the original meeting date back by 2 weeks. despite this, only 3 out of the 8 members finished the book. i must say, this nobel prize winning novel by josé saramago was a tough, tough read. saramago's writing style has no quotation marks, instead dialogue between characters are inmbedded within 3-4 page long paragraphs and are differentiated between a simple comma.

on top of trying to decipher who is speaking what, saramago goes onto long run-on sentence rants about the commentatires of life between descriptions of problems that the characters are encountering. you end up thinking, 'thank you for these revelation on life that only an 80 year-old man like yourself can bestow, but can we get on with the story? what is your point?'

our discussion of the book was really interesting, yet light and fun. it was also fun to reveal the story to those who abandoned the book.

if you are up for reading a commentary on capitalistic commercialism (hmm is there any other?) then try the cave.