As I've seen and posted on many times before, most of Jose Saramago's novels appear to fall into mostly allegorical, meta-fictional, or bizarre 'what-if' scenarios, and because of this The Elephant's Journey seems like it shouldn't really fit into his collected works. We don't have a boatload of references to other works, or weird sci-fi elements as plot points; The Elephant's Journey is simple: the king of Portugal in the 1500's decides to give the archduke of Germany an unusual wedding gift- his own elephant. The gifter and the giftee barely even appear in the novel, as a majority of the story is focused solely on how a huge group of soldiers and one trainer managed to cross half of Europe with an elephant in tow. It's more of an adventure book with touches of historical fiction thrown in; this journey did in fact really happen, although Saramago took plenty of liberties with the story. While some of his novels have frustrated me, and others were very good, The Elephant's Journey felt like a solid mid-point level of enjoyment for Saramago for me- he's a good enough writer that he took a somewhat boring story and made it a decent read. Still though, he has meatier stuff that I'd recommend over this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment