The Cave

My Grandma and I started an electronic book club about a year ago, that is, if a "club" can consist of just two people. Anyway, it's not particularly exclusive and anybody, even if you're a nobody or just somebody, can "join". The rule of the club is that any books we read must have been written by somebody who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the book need not be the author's most famous or even written prior to receiving the prize. Other than that, anything goes. We've made it through the following books so far:

1. Quo Vadis by Henryk Sientkiewicz
2. A Personal Matter by Oe Kenzaburo
3. Beloved by Toni Morrison
4. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
5. Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
6. The Cave by José Saramago

Each book has been special for its own reasons, but some have been more special than others. We've already visited ancient Rome, modern Japan, slavery, the Spanish Civil War, Cairo, and the "Center". Sometimes we've visited topics we would've preferred not to have visited, but maybe we're better off for having done so.

We most recently finished The Cave, a story about an elderly potter, his daughter and son-in-law, and a dog called Found. The story itself isn't so important, its the poetic and insightful writing that makes this book a fun read. Paragraphs often surpassed three or four pages, some sentences were up to a page long and full of commas. Dialogue was not seperated in the usual style, but rather by commas and capital letters. This made it difficult to follow at times, until you realized that it didn't matter who said the words, only that they were said. Saramago is really a poet, but maybe he realized that he would have a better chance of making a living by writing stories. This story is really a poem, disguised by a plot. Read it for the word play, but stay and enjoy the symbolism, for which there is a lot: the circularity of life, self-discovery, individuality, the dangers of mass marketing, Plato's cave, and pottery (believe me, there is a common thread through these things).

So, what's next?