Blindness – Jose Saramago (1997)
Social/Anthropological Commentary, Fantasy
I’m certainly less happy now than before
On the back cover of my edition of the book, a quote reads ‘This is a shattering work by a literary master...a book of real stature.’ Now, whilst it’s unfair to judge anything against preset expectations, you’re going to anyway, I mean, you wouldn’t read a book if you thought it was going to be shit. Whatever the case, the book has an innate weightiness to it, which kind of means it’s got to be awesome or fall flat on its face. You know, like Bohemian Rhapsody or something, it’s not the kind of the thing you can think is just OK.
The premise of the book is this: ‘no food, no water, no government, no hierarchy, no obligation, no order. This is not anarchy, this is blindness’. The basic idea is that by diminishing life to its most basic components, in a sort of survival of the fittest context, we will be able to shine a light on the most fundamental aspects of human nature. Saramago even goes as far as to say that this state is inhuman, and indeed this is a central preoccupation of the novel. The problem is though that, apart from this idea, there are few other overarching themes that appear consistently throughout the book. Rather, Saramago seems to want to philosophise on anything and everything throughout the book. There are two problems with this: reducing humanity (or not) to its most basic components, whether in a novel or more scientific thought experiment, is not the same as finding out what is at the core of humanity, since we cease, as Saramago himself states, to be investigating humanity at all. This creates a major inconsistency in the book, as he spends a huge chunk of his time telling us lots of profound things about humanity.
Fine though, that's more a wanky technical point than anything else. The other problem is that Saramago randomly fires off aphorisms, sometimes connected to the idea of blindness, sometimes not, but often puts no thought into them at all. He is blessed with a wonderfully simplistic prose style which suggests deep wisdom without him actually having to say anything. This would be fine if he didn’t just talk shit all the time. He seems to be so in love with his own style to the extent where he just writes things that sound nice in his head. For example, none of the characters in the book have names, but are referred to only by their professions ‘since names have ceased to have meaning in the world of the blind’. If you think about it, that’s actually completely the other way round: professions have ceased to have meaning since no one is actually capable of going to work anymore, and names take on a much greater significance as the only remaining traditional method of identifying anyone. I had a whole notepad filled with other stupid shit he said but then I lost it, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Having said all of this, the plot is enthralling and I believe it would make a fantastic film. Any future dystopias are fun and this would fit right in amongst films like Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later. So he’s got a good plot, and to be honest, sometimes I did see why he’s a Noble prize winner. When he does strike gold in terms of the actual content of what he says, considering the beautiful naturalness of his style (he wouldn’t have written the word 'naturalness' for instance), the results are succinctly breathtaking: ‘Before, when we could still see, there were also blind people, Few in comparison, the feelings in use were those of someone who could see, therefore blind people felt with the feelings of others, not as the blind people they were, now, certainly, what is emerging are the real feelings of the blind.’ (Incidentally this backs up the above point: if blindness is not humanity (as he argues), and now the real feelings of the blind are emerging, we're not investigating the feelings of humanity.)
I think there’s a good chance that I’m holding it too harshly against Saramago for isolated pieces of pretension rather than for the failure of the novel as a whole, but as far as I’m concerned, the whole thing is presented as this all-encompassing , anthropological theses and too often what he says is either self-contradictory or just not true.
The thing is yeah, you can either trust the guy who wrote a review with two quotes to back up what he’s saying, or an internationally acclaimed Nobel Prize winning author, I think you know the right decision.
2nd Book review: 10/08/11
A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1963)
Gritty, real-life
I am neither disappointed nor happy, but feel slight resentment for consequently being reminded of the numbness of existence
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I’m so bored, I’m so fucking bored, bored, boring, boring, bored.
This book is well written, but at the same time reading it is like wading through wet cement. If that sentence sounds like a contradiction in terms let me explain. The thing is, if your agenda is to write a book about the monotony and hopelessness of a Gulag Prisoner’s (Zek’s) life then the better you write it the more boring it is, and Solzhenitsyn is a very good writer. Because this is just a ‘day in the life’, it is guaranteed from the off that nothing will happen, there’s no prison escape here, no mass rebellion in the camp. By page thirty you’re thinking ‘Ok I get it’ as he’s told you in depth about breakfast and how fucking cold it is, and around page 100, when you’ve just spent 10 pages (a tenth of the book) reading about the entire process of building and cementing a concrete wall you are smashing your head into bone china whilst squeezing your nipples and shaving your dog in dismay. Of course, the book has to get you to this point to truly evoke the mood it is hoping for, but if the cost of understanding such monotony is to experience it yourself, then what’s the fucking point?
Of course, the book serves a higher purpose. On its release in the mid-60’s, it drew back the iron curtain that had been screening the widespread experiences of millions of Russians for the rest of the world to gawp at, contributing in some part to the gradual thawing of Communism and the emancipation of the Russian people as a whole (depending on your perspective, Russia’s still a pretty gashtown place to live. Disclaimer: I mean this in sympathy to the Russian people rather than in a racist sense. This website does not condone racism in any sense, except to Scottish people). For this reason, it’s existence should be valued. However, that’s all in the past now, if you want to know about such things read Horrible Histories, they’re well better.
1st Book review: 26/07/11
The Fall – Albert Camus (1956)
Existential Headfuck
Bum sex, any kind
Has there ever been another author who could penetrate so unnervingly to the very essence of the human condition, whatever that might mean? With a flick of the pen Camus unveils to us thoughts which we had never known were ours yet were there or along, or conversely the all-pervasiveness of thoughts we’d thought belonged only to us.
Of course, it is, in a way, absurd for me to make such a comment, since I cannot speak for the entire human race, but Camus’ enduring resonance surely derives from the fact that he strikes this chord within all of us. Perhaps what is most disquieting about ‘The Fall’ is that this analysis is delivered by the misanthropic and manipulative narrator. ‘The lawyer’ comments on his ability to speak to someone as if he were describing the inner workings of that person’s mind, whilst never straying from well worn clichés, like some sort of omniscient astrologist.
But such self-deprecation does not stand up to the cutting observations Camus makes throughout, unsettling my secular soul [that paradox sounds cool but doesn’t actually mean anything] as no one else can. Despite being published over half a century ago, no novel critiques modern day conceptions of eudaimonia so shatteringly, as he debases the validity of traditional morality in the absence of God as irreversibly as he does the validity of other artificial ethical and existential codes. On introduction to the protagonist we see the perfect life: handsome, charming and promiscuous, the lawyer also revels exclusively in doing good, and feels elevated to a higher plain of existence through his benevolence. Our hearts soar as his deeds are described, we embrace him as the ultimate moral archetype, and vow to do as he does as soon as we put the book down.
And then, the floor is pulled from under us, and our chests get tight, as at the final upward creak of the rollercoaster before it plunges downwards (before the fall you might say, if you were a wanker). That is to say, our narrator recounts the day when a feeling such as this beset him, and such is the all pervasive existential weight of the narrative that we empathise completely and uncritically, reading on not so much to discover the fate of the narrator as our own.
Here Camus introduces the concept of existence as ‘double’, as he shines a light on the horrible duplicity, triplicity... multiplicty of all things. Suddenly, everything is stripped away but the mirror and our naked selves, though we have never looked like this before. Existence is revealed in all its gaudy solipsistic light and suddenly we see ourselves as the lawyer does: selfish, base and lost. Camus’ ability to beckon the mind to thoughts from which the mind cowers is frightening, and in a torrential outburst the floodgates are opened on every dark characteristic we never dared acknowledge.
Phew. I almost certainly go too far here, this book will (probably) not make you want to kill yourself, and the lawyer of course only concentrates on the negative aspects of humanity, so with the novel being a monologue, there is no room given for a riposte. Of course, Camus was not a misanthrope, nor was he depressed. Knowledge of this perhaps softens the blow, as we understand that Camus has set up ‘the lawyer’ in distinction from himself, a bitter and weary philosophiser who talks in flowery language (markedly different to the measured prose of ‘The Outsider’ for instance, who shares much more in common with the young Camus). In this light, it serves more as a warning of the dangers which can face us, perhaps from too much self-absorption, or perhaps from simply taking too seriously what is not so serious (this is our lot after all and moping will not change it). I do not mean to patronise by suggesting that in this last (bracketed no less) sentence I provide the solution for the profound and disturbing truths unearthed within the book. However it is important to note that, crudely speaking, Camus’ life-work can be understood as setting up the bleakest of existential questions in his earlier works with the aim of deconstructing and defeating them later, but due to his untimely death all that remains is the conviction that he could have done so, which I have expressed as above
Please read this book, if only to make me feel less alone in my empathy with the protagonist.
