I've heard quite a bit about Jose Saramago, especially his books Blindness and The Cave, from reading buddies. But when I went to the bookstore to browse through some of his stuff, I ended up being drawn to this one.
So far, the narrator's voice has a stuffy exactness that seems to evoke the mania of its central character, a lowly bureaucrat. His hobby is collecting information on famous people from his millions of files. He finds himself in possession, one day, of the file of an anonymous, ordinary person and become haunted by her and decides to track her down. There is a sort of comic edge to the story's voice. Imagine if Gogol's Diary of a Madman was crossed with Terry Gilliam's film Brazil (one of my all time favorite movies).
2 comments:
I will go pick this book. Looks good to me. Thanks.
To be honest I haven't heard much about him until the recent cinema news on Blindness being made into a movie. Your description is intriguing though, I daresay this will slot nicely into my long to-be-read list!
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