Book Recommendations

Death At Intervals and Boxwood

Death At Intervals is my third Saramago book. It’s a compact novel that starts with how death decides to stop taking lives in an unnamed country when the New Year arrives. I suppose it’s precisely the sort of plot that you would expect Saramago, that wily old man, to pull off with aplomb, and he does, with a mixture of deliberate ignorance and wit, underscored by tremendous wisdom and compassion.

Then it takes a turn, and death returns, writing letters to people who are going to die. And it all seems to go very well until one day a letter is returned, and death learns… a little something. Not quite the turn I was expecting of Saramago, actually, but he carefully steers it towards its end, and it becomes quite a thing of beauty.

It’s a sparkling read from start to finish, a magic trick that leaves you enthralled with a snap of the fingers. It’s in turns humorous and dark, wise and romantic, a compact novel that fascinates and entertains with the very best of them.

The style, I realise, might be somewhat challenging for some. At least, I often read complaints about that. I think it’s fine. I think it’s brilliant, actually, and is very natural to read. On the other hand, the second book I’m going to introduce, Camilo José Cela’s Boxwood, took a bit of adjustment. It had in part to do with how I had only four hours of sleep on the morning that I started it, and it was quite a Herculean feat that I managed the first paragraph after realising that I was reading with only commas.

But once you do get attuned to it, Cela’s last novel–a day-to-day account of different lives in Galicia, on the Spanish coast–is simply magnificent. Fragments and fragments, bits of thoughts, scores of memory, shreds of imagination, all stitched together with few periods and many commas, into a lush historical and cultural landscape. It is a book about fables and folktales and stories and the annals of history. It’s a story of the common man and the wonderful common man. It is sprawling in its own way, like the beautiful complexity of an orchestral work woven together by a true master.

In the end, it might be difficult to appreciate the depth of the achievement at first. It’s messy and disjointed and seems to be all over the place at first. (At least, it did for me.) And then you stick with it, you give it a chance, and it starts to show you how you’re missing it all. You’re missing the tonal inflections, the rhythms and cadences, the hidden music behind the cacophony. And when you open your eyes to that symphony, you can’t read it the same way again.

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© 2009 a modest odyssey.