🦋 Saramago is my favorite living author
Guess what the mailman just dropped through the hole in my front door? It is José Saramago's newly* translated Death with Interruptions. Happy! I have been reading a couple of posts over the last few days where people name D.F. Wallace as their favorite (sadly no longer) living author, which sort of thing always makes me wonder whether I have an identifiable favorite; and I think right at the moment, the answer is clearly yes, and that my favorite living author is Saramago. My tastes change of course; I had never even read any Saramago before last winter, so he is a recently acquired favorite. Perhaps this time next year I will have found a new fad. But for the moment I feel pretty strongly about specifying him as the living writer who speaks most directly to me. Before I even open the covers: this is a beautiful volume. Love the black field, the ghostly moth. The epigraph is from Wittgenstein; I don't know where it is taken from and Google is not helping me, presumably because of translation issues: If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields. This is making me flash on the discussion of Wallace over the past few days, but possibly just because I've got Wallace on the brain... There is another epigraph, from the Book of Predictions: "We will know less and less what it means to be human." I'm not sure if this is a reference to The Book of Predictions published in 1980 (which I've never heard of before just now), or something else, perhaps something internal to the story. In any case it sounds like a valid prediction. Well it's getting to be a long post about a book which I have not even started reading. I will close with the opening sentence of the story: The following day, no one died.
 *I actually think it was translated about 6 months ago and published in the UK, under the title Death at Intervals; but it is just this week available in the US. I'm assuming the two editions must be pretty similar outside the titles.
posted evening of Monday, September 15th, 2008
➳ More posts about Death with Interruptions
➳ More posts about José Saramago
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Epigraphs
I've just finished Saramago's El Hombre Duplicado (2002). Wonderful! Next time with Saramago will be Las Intermitencias de la Muerte, which is the book you're reading now.
My favorite living author should be either Saramago or M.C. Coetzee. I think I enjoy the later just a little bit more.
posted evening of September 15th, 2008 by Jorge López
El Hombre Duplicado
This is called The Double in English translation; I haven't heard anything about it yet.
M.C. Coetzee
Do you mean J.M. Coetzee? I have yet to read any of his books.
posted evening of September 15th, 2008 by Jeremy
duh! yeah, I meant J.M... that was me writing while I was about to fall asleep over the keyboard!
posted evening of September 16th, 2008 by Jorge López
| 
where 