Required Reading Fail: The Cave by Jose Saramago
I liked most of the books that I had to read for school, but there was one book that I absolutely loathed and that was The Cave by Jose Saramago. Why do I loathe this book? Let me count the ways.
First off, his writing style was almost unreadable in this book. In case you were not aware, Saramago is a Very Important Literary Author with a Very Important Literary Style wherein he writes in stream-of-consciousness style, rambling on for pages and pages. This wouldn't be so bad on its own, but the problem is that this stream-of-consciousness style involves never using dialogue tags, almost never using periods, and using commas in their place. His sentences can literally go on for pages and pages of clauses separated by nothing but endless streams of commas before he deigns to use a period. Pretentious as it was, it actually worked in Blindness as a reflection of the mental state of people caught up in a pandemic. It was sheer torture to read in The Cave where there was no reason for him to use it other than to be terribly clever and to impress the reader. Cue me being completely unimpressed.
Another aspect I disliked was how the plot and characterization and anything that might be remotely interesting were all crushed in service of the moral of this story and what a simplistic and putrid moral that was. It was nothing more than a re-tread of The Cave by Plato that brought nothing new to the original text and instead regurgitated it and hammered it in at every point possible. Plot, what plot? Why have characters when you can have cardboard caricatures instead and excuse by claiming to write a modern fable instead?
(This next paragraph contains spoilers so just skip to the next one if you want to avoid them)
Here's a brief summary: There are people who live in the Centre who lead fabulous lives of meaningless consumption and then there are the poorer people who live outside who are either horrible and want nothing more than to live in the centre or beautiful souls whose poverty has left them with a greatness of spirit that those shallow people in the Cave Centre can never hope to aspire to. Our POV character is one of those beautiful souls and is a middle-aged man whose daughter is married to a security guard whose parents are among the Horrible Poor People (that's the extent of their characterization). His son-in-law gets a job at the Centre and his wife and the narrator join him there. They then lead pointless and silly lives in the Centre except for when the narrator leaves to have annoying conversations with a woman outside the Centre who also has a beautiful soul and is nothing more than a cardboard love interest for Our Hero, until they realize that they're chained up in Plato's cave, man. The text leaves no interpretation free for the reader and explicitly points out to the reader as if the reader was a stupid child who needed their hand held every step of the way. The cardboard then all leave the Centre and the surrounding area to seek their own fortunes and I wished that giant crocodiles would show up and eat them all.
This condescension on his part is bad enough, but when you combine with his writing style, it makes want to go back in time and smack the smug git who wrote this stupid book. I know that he won the Nobel Prize for literature, but I don't care because it doesn't make this book suck any less and he has far written far better than this.
If you want to try Saramago, read Blindness instead. It's better on almost every conceivable level. If you don't absolutely adore the way he writes, stay far, far away from this book.
First off, his writing style was almost unreadable in this book. In case you were not aware, Saramago is a Very Important Literary Author with a Very Important Literary Style wherein he writes in stream-of-consciousness style, rambling on for pages and pages. This wouldn't be so bad on its own, but the problem is that this stream-of-consciousness style involves never using dialogue tags, almost never using periods, and using commas in their place. His sentences can literally go on for pages and pages of clauses separated by nothing but endless streams of commas before he deigns to use a period. Pretentious as it was, it actually worked in Blindness as a reflection of the mental state of people caught up in a pandemic. It was sheer torture to read in The Cave where there was no reason for him to use it other than to be terribly clever and to impress the reader. Cue me being completely unimpressed.
Another aspect I disliked was how the plot and characterization and anything that might be remotely interesting were all crushed in service of the moral of this story and what a simplistic and putrid moral that was. It was nothing more than a re-tread of The Cave by Plato that brought nothing new to the original text and instead regurgitated it and hammered it in at every point possible. Plot, what plot? Why have characters when you can have cardboard caricatures instead and excuse by claiming to write a modern fable instead?
(This next paragraph contains spoilers so just skip to the next one if you want to avoid them)
Here's a brief summary: There are people who live in the Centre who lead fabulous lives of meaningless consumption and then there are the poorer people who live outside who are either horrible and want nothing more than to live in the centre or beautiful souls whose poverty has left them with a greatness of spirit that those shallow people in the Cave Centre can never hope to aspire to. Our POV character is one of those beautiful souls and is a middle-aged man whose daughter is married to a security guard whose parents are among the Horrible Poor People (that's the extent of their characterization). His son-in-law gets a job at the Centre and his wife and the narrator join him there. They then lead pointless and silly lives in the Centre except for when the narrator leaves to have annoying conversations with a woman outside the Centre who also has a beautiful soul and is nothing more than a cardboard love interest for Our Hero, until they realize that they're chained up in Plato's cave, man. The text leaves no interpretation free for the reader and explicitly points out to the reader as if the reader was a stupid child who needed their hand held every step of the way. The cardboard then all leave the Centre and the surrounding area to seek their own fortunes and I wished that giant crocodiles would show up and eat them all.
This condescension on his part is bad enough, but when you combine with his writing style, it makes want to go back in time and smack the smug git who wrote this stupid book. I know that he won the Nobel Prize for literature, but I don't care because it doesn't make this book suck any less and he has far written far better than this.
If you want to try Saramago, read Blindness instead. It's better on almost every conceivable level. If you don't absolutely adore the way he writes, stay far, far away from this book.