Well, here's my first taste of just straight up not liking a Saramago book. Like the previous three (Blindness, Seeing, The Stone Raft) it has a simple and interesting hook- a proofreader working on a non-fiction books called The History of the Siege of Lisbon deliberately adds a single word, thus changing the entire meaning of the book. As a parallel to this story, Saramago offers up his own interpretation of what happened during the siege of Lisbon, chastising the proofreader's inability to get it right, resulting in three different levels of meta-story that I'd normally eat up and beg for more. But I don't know, something about the tone here just didn't sit quite right with me. The run-ons and lack of punctuation that usually work fine seemed especially grating, and the interesting concept didn't end up going in any particularly interesting directions. I'd normally blame this on History being one of Jose Saramago's first books- perhaps he simply hadn't perfected his writing style- but this came out a few years after The Stone Raft, which, while odd, I found at least decent. Well, there's 8 more Saramago books on my Kindle, so unlike before I'm going to temper my expectations from the rest of them, aside from maybe the one Stan commented on- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
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