The Stone Raft

More from my boy, Jose Saramago. As I said in a previous post, I found a steal- 12 Saramago novels for 20 bucks on the Kindle, and this is only the third one down, so he'll be popping up on the Back-Blog regularly for a while. The first two I read were heavily connected- Blindness and Seeing; but The Stone Raft is the first stand-alone Saramago novel I've read. It was... a bit odd. As I've said before Saramago's modus operandi is usually to come up with an interesting gimmick to start off the book and let the rest of the book "write itself" by having some very normal people simply react to the situation at hand. This usually doesn't lend itself well to particularly interesting climaxes, but the stories are more a combination of intriguing allegory and a bit of a "what would you do?" theme as well rather than straight thrillers or mysteries. What would the government do if people just stopped voting? What would you do if you and everyone around you couldn't see? Basically what you'd expect, but Saramago provides interesting enough commentary on the events to keep me reading- at times he'll go off on a tangent about some literary cliche that bothers him, or he'll criticize a character and all but tell the reader "that was a dumb decision!" much more elegantly than I could ever summarize here. Anyway, when I read about the plot for The Stone Raft I was intrigued even if it sounded like it would easily fit into my Saramago stereotype- the Iberian peninsula somehow breaks off from Europe, slowly drifting off into the midst of the Atlantic Ocean. Naturally, I expected most of the book to be about people dealing with the sudden trans-Atlantic journey. This covers about a quarter of the book. The rest deals with a ragtag group of misfit "superheroes" who were all suddenly able to develop some type of power at the exact moment that Spain and Portugal split off. These powers seem to have nothing to do with eachother and in the end are inconsequential, but I can't get over how laughable they are. One guy is able to pick up a huge rock and throw it really far, then suddenly loses his super strength seconds later. One guy is followed by a flock of birds. Still another claims he can "feel the Earth vibrate" and seems to be vibrating when you touch him. Maybe he just has Parkinsons? Lastly, and perhaps most pitifully, a girl drew a line in the dirt with a stick and the line can't wash away. Why Saramago gave these guys such oddly terrible powers, I'll never know- he rarely explains the odd things that happen in his books, and I wasn't searching for an answer anyway. I guess it's just a plot device to get the characters together. Once they did get together it turned into a nice character-based story about people reacting to a crisis, but it certainly didn't need that bizarre setup to get there. So yeah, kudos to Jose for doing something unexpected, even if I have no idea where he was going with it. While I didn't like it as much as Seeing or Blindness, I have no problem reading 9 more of his novels, which is more than I can say about plenty of other authors.