وماذا بعد ؟
متى ستفعلها يا سيد خوسيه؟
متى سأقرأ لك شيئًا عاديًا لا يبهرني؟
ساراماجو، اعطني أسوأ ما لديك بالله!


فيها حاجات كتير ممكن أتكلم عنها ، بس صعب تتكتب

4 نجمات
الخامسة، انتزعها ساراماجو عنوة في آخر ثلاثين صفحة

السرد هو البناء الخارجي للرواية لكن من الداخل الفلسفة هي المكون الأساسي ولكنها ليست بالمعقدة لانها واقعنا اليوم...

السرد يحتل معظم الرواية من خلال عائلة سيبريانو الجور الرجل العادي صانع الخزف واختيار تلك المهنة لم يكن عبثا وإنما اختاره سراماجو ليسقط على بعض المفاهيم في الحياة..

اما الفلسفة وهي الهدف الأساسي الذي لايظهر الا في النهاية وهي عن اطروحة أفلاطون (plato'sallegory)حول طبيعة الإنسان..

يقول جميل صليبا:

«يرمز إلى ان النفس الانسانية في حالتها الحاضرة، أي خلال اتصالها بالبدن، اشبه شيء بسجين مقيد بالسلاسل، وضع في كهف، وخلفه نار ملتهبة تضيء الأشياء وتطرح ظلالها على جدار اقيم امامه، فهو لا يرى الأشياء الحقيقية بل يرى ظلالها المتحركة، ويظن بها حقائق.»

«فالكهف في هذه الاسطورة هو العالم المحسوس، والظلال هي المعرفة الحسية، والأشياء الحقيقية التي تحدث هذه الظلال هي المُثُل»..

فنحن اليوم نعيش في كهف الحياه مقيدين في الوهم وانفسنا مقيدة في كهوف أفكارنا..

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صورة ممتازة تصف الأطروحة في أيامنا تلك، فنحن نرى ونعيش ما يراد لغيرنا ان نراه...

القراءة الثانية لسراماجو بعد التجربة الأولى التي اخذلتني تماما في مسيرة الفيل ،وبالرغم انها لم تعجبني كثيرا الا انها واعدة لقراءة باقي اعماله وهي رواية صعبة لاتنسى تحتاج صبر كثير..

José Saramago nu încetează să mă surprindă cu fiecare carte pe care o descopăr, toate scrierile sale fiind o adevărată artă.
Cartea de față, se dorește a fi o reinterpretare a ,,Mitului peșterii’’, obiectiv ce este îndeplinit cu mare succes, dar alăturând și alte teme, cum ar fi: diferența dintre generații, conflictul familial, evoluția omului, iluziile pe care omul și le crează despre lumea înconjurătoare, moartea și bineînțeles, rescrierea ,,Mitului peșterii’’.
Nu merită citită, ci trebuie citită, fiind un adevărat îndemn la reflecție asupra existenței umane și oferind perspective noi asupra problemelor contemporane.

,,Autoritare, paralizante, circulare, uneori eliptice, frazele de efect, numite în glumă pepite de aur, sunt un flagel malign, dintre cele mai primejdioase care au pustiit lumea. Le spunem celor cu mintea confuză, Cunoaște-te pe tine însuți, ca și cum cunoașterea de sine n-ar fi a cincea și cea mai dificilă operație din aritmeticile umane, le spunem celor abulici, Dacă vrei, poți, de parcă realitățile bestiale ale lumii nu s-ar amuza în fiecare zi inversând poziția relativă a verbelor, le spunem nehotărâților, Începe cu începutul, ca și cum începutul ar fi capătul vizibil al unui fir răsucit stângaci de care ar fi de ajuns să tragem și să tot tragem până ajungem la capătul celălalt….’’

Pag. 77

4.5/5

كدأبهِ ساراماغو، على الأقل في «العمى» و «كل الأسماء» و «انقطاعات الموت» يعمل على تشريح علاقتنا بالدولة الحديثة، المتغوّلة، الباردة، المادية، بأذرعها الأخطبوطية الأبدية، التي تسمى أيضًا؛ بيروقراطية.

حكاية صانع خزف تجاوز الستّين، يعيشُ مع ابنته وصهره، يخسر هويته الوحيدة التي يعرفها - هوية الخزّاف - عندما تفقد الخزفيات قيمتها السوقية بعد ظهور البلاستيك.

بقدر ما تبدو الرواية مثل رحلة لرجلٍ - يصرُّ النظام الرأسمالي على تحويله إلى فائض بشري - يحاول إعادة صياغة حياته، فهي أيضًا مشاغبة فلسفية لكهف أفلاطون، لحقيقة أننا مجرد أشخاص يحدقون في الظلال ويتوهمون المعرفة.

لا أحتاج إلى الاستفاضة حول أسلوب الكاتب في الكتابة؛ الفصول تكتب كصكوك متّصلة بالكاد تمنحك فرصة للتوقف، مرهِقة وممتعة معًا. الحوارات المسرودة المعجونة مع كل شيء آخر، والقدرة على التفلسف والتجريد والتأمل بأريحية يُحسد عليها.

هذه هي الرواية السادسة التي قرأتها لساراماغو، لكنني قررتُ أنها تجيء في المرتبة الثانية، بعد العمى، في تأثيرها، ربما أنني حلمتُ بشخصية الخزّاف ليلة أمس، واستيقظت قلقة عليه.

Saramago sets this story in a dystopia but it is not far off in the future – we almost live in it now!

The Center is where the well-off live. It’s a massive single 50-story building with apartments, galleria malls, museums and Disneyland areas. Every kind of experience imaginable is offered including all sports, such as skiing, and “environmental rooms” where you can experience sunny beaches, rain and blizzards. Around the Center are rings of slums, industrial factories and factory farms in greenhouses.

It’s a big brother dystopia. Security guards and video cameras are everywhere, and any unusual behavior gets you noticed and perhaps “written up” by the guards. When you drive outside the Center you are stopped by guards “checking your documents.” Because supply trucks have to bring goods and food in from the rings outside the Center, they have to pass through the slums. Occasionally they are waylaid by bandits but because this is a Portuguese dystopia, the police kind of let it happen without much ado.



The story, which we are told in the blurbs, is simple. An old man, a widower and a potter, lives in the far outskirts, a traditional rural village beyond the Center and its rings. He lives with his only daughter and her husband. Her husband is a guard in the Center but lives in a dormitory and commutes home for a few days off every ten days or so. His dream is to become a “resident guard” – that is, get a promotion and with it an apartment to live full-time in the magical Center and bring his wife and father-in-law with him.

The old potter struggles to make a living. He sells plates and pots to the Center but recently people have stopped buying them, so he is experimenting with making decorative ceramic dolls. His daughter helps him.

The business collapses; the son gets his job and they all move into dreamland. You can imagine what the old man thinks of this – his life was his work and his identity. Now retired, he wanders aimlessly around Disneyland all day. The only other significant character in the story is a widow in the village. The old man and the widow are sweet on each other but he won’t think about marriage because he cannot support her without his pottery business, now defunct.

And maybe we can count the dog as a character too: “Everyone tells us that animals stopped talking a long long time ago, however, no one has yet been able to prove that they have not continued to make secret use of thought.”

Now the title. A short time after they have all moved to an apartment in the Center, new construction uncovers an archaeological site in a cave. The area is blocked off and guarded; guards are forbidden to talk about what is in the cave. But the son-in-law lets the old man in to view it. It is so horrific and shocking that the son-in-law quits his job and they all decide to leave the Center and start over somewhere else. [It is horrifying and I’m not even putting it in a spoiler!]

The book is written in a stream of consciousness style with long sentences, mostly using commas, but it is divided into fairly short chapters (8-12 pages).

The author has won the Nobel Prize, so we expect and we get great writing and deep thoughts:

“It is true what people say, the young have the ability, but lack the wisdom, and the old have the wisdom, but lack the ability.

Daughter: “Don’t talk about dying, Pa.”
Father: “The only time we can talk about death is while we’re alive, not afterward.”

“…the game of give and take which is what married life almost always comes down to”

“Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.”

“Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don’t understand that the words are merely stepping stones paced across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they’re there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it’s the other side that matters”

“He had suddenly seen what the world was like, how there are many lies and no truths, well, there must be some out there, but they are continually changing, and not only does a possible truth give us insufficient time to consider its merits, we also have to check first that this possible truth is not, in fact, a probable lie.”

“but nowadays, it is only from eighty years onward that old age, authentic and unambiguous and from which there can be no return, nor even any pretense of a return, begins, de facto and unapologetically, to deserve the name by which we designate our last days.”

“arguments are more or less random groups of words waiting to be placed in a syntactical order that will give them a sense they themselves are not entirely sure that they have.”

“At that moment he realized that his memory of the dream was about to flee, that he would only manage to hold on to bits of it, and he did not know whether he should rejoice over the little that remained or regret the much that was lost, this is something else that often happens after we have dreamed.”



In a witty and humorous passage the author dissects old ‘nuggets of wisdom’ which he calls a “malignant plague.” It is funny how you can savage things like “know thyself,” “where there’s a will there’s a way,” and “begin at the beginning.”

A great read. I’ve read five or six of Saramago’s books and this is now my favorite.

Photo of Lisbon from independent.co.uk
Photo of the author from therumpus.net

José Saramago's The Cave is another superb work of fiction by the Portuguese author. There are five characters: Cipriano, a potter; Marta, his daughter; Marcal, his son-in-law; the widow Isaura Estudiosa; and the dog named, simply, "Found." They live in an unnamed village separated from a nearby city by a "Green Zone" and an "Industrial Zone." After that come the shacks in which live the poor. Finally there is the 48-story complex referred to as The Center, which combines air-conditioned apartments with commercial and recreational facilities.

Cipriano has been producing pottery vessels for The Center on an exclusive contract which is canceled, leaving him without work. His daughter thinks up the idea of producing painted pottery figurines and collaborates with her husband and father on producing samples. But again The Center cancels, saying there is insufficient demand. The potter resigns himself to moving into The Center, where Marcal is entitled to an apartment because he is a security guard there.

At the same time, the widower Cipriano grows increasingly interested in the widow Isaura. And he is adopted by a dog whom he calls "Found." Found is as much a character as any of the humans, and Saramago makes a point of going into the dog's mind as if he were a human character.

With his pottery business in shambles, Cipriano agrees to move into the The Center with his daughter and son-in-law, until a strange discovery on one of the lower levels of the giant building changes everything.

"This is the dangerous thing about appearances, when they deceive us, it’s always for the worse."

The Cave is a strangely mesmerizing book. I have no idea why I liked it as much as I did. It was not enjoyable to read.... and yet I had to finish it. 

It's pretty much a running stream of consciousness of the characters, mainly the elderly potter whose product is no longer wanted. People now prefer plastic, not his higher quality, but perishable, dishes.

The reason it was not enjoyable to read is because there are very few paragraph breaks and the large, blocky text triggered headaches for me. It made me nauseated at times. I'm not a glutton for punishment, so you'd think I would just stop reading..... but I couldn't. Like I said, it was strangely mesmerizing.

The writing, no matter how clunky, just reels you in. The author does not use quotation marks, or even periods when characters are talking. It's written like this, Different character's voices are only seen because they start with a capitalized letter for the first word, But it's hard to keep track of who is speaking, And so I found myself re-reading dialogue much of the time, Trying to figure out who the hell is saying what.

If you can listen to audio, I think it would probably be preferable to reading this book. Maybe most people get used to the style of writing and I might have if not for the headaches. 

The blurb makes it sound like dystopia; it is not. It is an allegorical tale that has very little to do with the Centre other than the old man goes to live there, and the higher-ups at the Centre are who make his work redundant.

It's a beautiful allegory and I love how it ended.... but if this is typical of how José Saramago wrote, I won't be reading any more of his work.

“ الحقيقة أننا إذا ما مزجنا الماء بالصلصال أو الماء بالجبس أو الماء بالأسمنت فإننا نستطيع أن نقلب مخيلتنا مثلما نشاء من أجل اختراع تسمية لها أقل فظاظة .. أقل ابتذالا .. أقل عادية .. و لكننا سننتهي دوما آجلا أو عاجلا إلى الوصول إلى الكلمة الدقيقة. الكلمة التي تقول ما يتوجب قوله.: طين. آلهة كثيرون ممن هم معروفون أكثر من غيرهم لم يرغبوا في أية مادة أخرى من أجل مخلوقاتهم. و لكن من المشكوك فيه إذا ما كان ذلك التفضيل يمثل اليوم نقطة لصالح الطين أم نقطة ضده. ”

“قلبي في صدري أسيرٌ سجين
تُخجلهُ عشرةُ ماءٍ وطين
وكم جرى عزمي بتحطيمه
فكانَ يَنهاني نداءُ اليقين”

من رباعيات عمر الخيام

“هناك من يقضي حياته كلها في القراءة دون أن يمضي لما هو أبعد من ذلك. هؤلاء يبقون ملتصقين بالصفحات لا يدركون أن الكلمات ليست سوى أحجار مصفوفة تعترض تيار النهر. و إذا كانت هناك فإنها موجودة لكي نتمكن من عبور الضفة الأخرى. الضفة الأخرى هي المهمة. إلا إذا لم تكن لهذه الأنهار ضفتان و إنما ضفاف كثيرة. و كل شخص يقرأ تكون تلك هي ضفته الخاصة. و تكون له و له وحده الضفة التي سيصل إليها.
و لحسن الحظ أن الكتب موجودة و يمكن لنا أن ننساها في خزانة أو صندوق أو نتركها للغبار و العثة أو نهجرها في عتمة الأقبية. يمكن لنا ألا نمر عليها بعيوننا و لا نمسها لسنوات و سنوات و لكنها لا تهتم بذلك كله و تنتظر بهدوء منطبقة على نفسها كيلا يضيع شيء مما تحتويه في داخلها. و دوما تأتي اللحظة. يأتي هذا اليوم الذي نتساءل فيه. أين هو ذلك الكتاب؟ و يظهر أخيرا الكتاب المطلوب.”

صرخة يطلقها ساراماجو في وجه المدنية الحديثة بكل زيفها
عن الخالق الأصغر صانع الخزف من الطين و الصلصال تماما مثل خالقه باستثناء نفخ الروح
في عهد أصبح فيه الخزف و الفخار موضة قديمة
نحن يا سادة من أصبحنا موضة قديمة فما نحن إلا هذا الطين الذي التهب بنار الفرن اللافح ثم خرج ليواجه الحياة
عن الحياة في المركز مقرنين في الأصفاد تغشى وجوهنا نار العولمة و لهب المادية و سادية الروتين و البروقراطية.
لا ينتصر ساراماجو لأي اتجاه في النهاية بعد أن ترك الماء يجري في كلا الاتجاهين الا أن أيام الماضي تبقى لتحيا في الماضي و ايام المستقبل تظل حبلى بالتكهنات.

Lento, uggioso, monotono, tedioso all’inverosimile. Mi ha straziato l’anima, purtroppo non positivamente.
Ho odiato ogni singolo personaggio di questo libro, si salva il cane. Appena conclusa la lettura avrei voluto immediatamente dare fuoco al libro, se solo non fosse stato della biblioteca... Il più deludente tra tutti i Saramago letti.

داستان روان و جذابی بود.
گفتگوهای شخصیت‌ها نکته سنجی و ظرافت خاص ساراماگو را به همراه داشت.
ارتباطی که این داستان می‌تواند با خوانندگانش برقرار کند مثال زدنی است.
من داستان را با اشتیاق خواندم و لذت بردم توصیه می کنم حتما بخوانید.

من زندگی کردم،نگاه کردم،خواندم احساس کردم.
_مگر با خواندن چه میشود؟
_با خواندن تقریبا همه چیز را میفهمی.
_من هم میخوانم.
_ولی یک نوع خواندن در همه ی موارد مناسب نیست بلکه هرکدام نیاز به نوع خاصی از خواندن دارد.عده ای حتی یک عمر میخوانند ولی هرگز از حد متن فراتر نمیروند.آنها به صفحه میچسبند و نمیدانند که کلمات،همچون سنگ های بستر رودخانه برای رفتن به آن طرف رودخانه هستند.
برای ما مهم رفتن به آنطرف رودخانه است.

ورژن نمایشنامه صوتیش رو گوش دادم. چیز خاصی نداشت.