Abordo la reseña de la primera lectura conjunta del #vecindarioliterario con algo de nervios y mucha emoción, y es que “Historia del cerco de Lisboa”, de José Saramago, a pesar de salir en la lista de los “1001 libros que hay que leer antes de morir”, me ha dado más de un dolor de cabeza.

La premisa es genial, un corrector literario decide poner un “no” donde debía ir un “sí”, y este simple hecho es del que se sirve el autor para construir la ficción alrededor de este corrector protagonista y para narrar lo que fue el cerco de Lisboa.

Si la prosa de Saramago es compleja de por sí, leerla mientras se explaya en conceptos y personajes históricos y diatribas filosóficas puede ser más que complicado; reconozco que he encontrado en estas páginas párrafos con reflexiones que probablemente sean de lo mejor que he leído jamás, pero las peroratas histórico-filosóficas hacen deslucir las partes buenas.

En cuanto a lo que es la pura ficción, me ha parecido que la trama es original y diferente, que se pueden sacar grandes reflexiones de ella, pero debo reconocer que ni he empatizado con los personajes, ni me ha enganchado la historia, ni he sido capaz de disfrutar de ella como quizá merece una obra de este calibre.

Estoy segura de que, sin duda, no ha sido la mejor obra para empezar a leer a Saramago, pero me quedo con la satisfacción de haber sido capaz de hacerme con su prosa, de haber disfrutado, como digo, de esos párrafos tan bellos y brillantes y, sobre todo, de los buenos ratos que he pasado con los vecinos leyéndolo

Oh, wasn't this a dreadful experience...
I will keep this in my mind if I ever work in an office and have to make a gift to someone I don't like for Secret Santa, this could be the ultimate present.

Jose Saramago may not somebody who relies so heavily on plot. He utilizes stream-of-consciousness in "The History of the Siege of Lisbon" as a way to merge the history of the city’s past with that of the protagonist living out his life in the modern day. In the novel, conversations bear no quotations, no parentheses appear on added-on ideas/non sequiturs, nor are questions accompanied by a ?. Whole paragraphs are pages long, & it's safe to say that most of them contain a single action or noun which is then fully explored for the remainder of that paragraph: each minutiae is meticulously explained and more questions (plenty of the hypothetical kind) are added on to the subject in question. Also a heavy use of commas and lists is a way of penetrating truths in a deeper way. He's NOT MY KIND OF WRITER: he asks way too much of his readers, & one wonders what would happen if Saramago had SOMETHING going on, namely a STORY, & if he added all the flourishes that make him unique: THAT would truly grab me.

Here then (for my CONSCIOUSNESS & FICTION grad class) an attempt at a Saramagian yarn:

Montage

tLazaro has put on his contact lenses and is ready to get to work. Some saline solution still drips down the sides of his bright, bright eyes as he tidies up the bathroom a bit, dabbing the teeny puddles of water left on the rim of the faucet with the Kleenex he used previously to wipe the sides of his eyes, making perfect green vertical rectangles of the bath towels hanging on a chrome bar to his side, placing the half-empty bottle of solution, his eyeglasses which he won’t need anymore, and his contact case inside the mirror cabinet, then enters his room, his domain, his dark lair, sits still on his chair and exhales loudly. He hasn’t even looked at the posters which undoubtedly require, seek, his attention, which are the sole objects we must now devote our focus on. Let’s not look too much at this room, though there is a considerable plenty to contemplate here: books on the redwood shelf, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Corrections, White Teeth, The Secret History, The Rules of Attraction, The Blithedale Romance, all three Lord of the Rings plus The Hobbit, The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard, Bel Canto, Candide, The Shining, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord and additionally a huge array of colors, thin and almost invisible, in the form of individual DVD titles, Titanic, Cool Hand Luke, Mulholland Drive, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Halloween, Sleeping Beauty, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Pink Flamingoes, Lost in Translation, Before Sunrise plus some smaller slits of color nearby which conform exactly to the shapes of CDs the colors white, red, black, blue, magenta, with titles given them by the artists responsible, just as writers themselves must give names to their peculiar rowdy offspring made of ink and paper, but these music artists are more important than the forgettable titles of their work, songs played in supersonic repetition by the likes of Pink Floyd, E.L.O., Dr. Dre, NIN, Philip Glass, Black Flag, Maria Daniela y su Sonido Lasser and Britney Spears. All this is too much to see all at once but a mixture of all these catalysts and inspiring cores exists in some indiscernible form within the brain of our Lazaro. There is however a vast difference between all the inspiration found in these artistic forms of the modern age, their sheer attainability is surreal, all these masterpieces, all this plot, image and sound in a micro museum at our protagonist’s disposal, his points of reference, & the posters which are laid down like grey corpses, spread out the full length of the desk. These are definitely unfinished, unpublished, unseen by the masses, and they are precisely this way because at this point Lazaro is barely getting the courage to move his drawing pencil in concentric circles, rightward, downward, then back up again as the snake eats up its tail, as this surely will bring something out. Maybe the knife should gleam only slightly, he thinks then, at its tip, and maybe the victim’s mouth will be the circles, which can become as small or as large as the artist imagines. And words. There will be a cryptic feel to this poster, this attempt at art, attempt at permanence, just as those others are there now, looking down at him with ambiguity from their shelves, maybe even with some jealousy, and the feeling will be inspired by everything he’s ever come into contact with. He takes some certain image from a book, from a film, from the lyrics of songs and tries to do something of it, he takes it within himself to rearrange it, chip at it, add some meat to it, change its entire significance. He starts committing the pencil to the noisy endless paper, begins to think calmly, letting things displace themselves like autumn leaves from his cranium. The montage then is too much to bear, this happens when Lazaro thinks way too much on a single muchness, on one singular complexity, because everything everything has been done one or two or millions of times before and nothing is ever quite original, but only the montage will bring out something that he would have otherwise kept to himself, inside himself, entombed, and it hurts. He has, some hours later, a blueprint, an essence and sure existence, since now it is there for all to see, for there it is for Lazaro to finish off, and he is incredibly happy on many levels, one being that he has not wasted his time after all, one below that that this may actually turn out to be something, something good, and in the basement level which states that leaving things internal is just so wrong that it could lead to something bad, an overload, like cancer.

Ще ніколи так не раділа факту, що книга закінчилась

"a consciência de saber mais conduz-me à consciência de saber pouco"

The story of Raimundo Silva, a proofreader, who acts on an impulse and by adding a “no” changes the content of a book and his life too.

Same long phrases, same existential questions, same irony and humor between the lines. Really missed his style.

If you think about it, this book just tells a very limited story: a normally very accurate corrector in a whim changes a 'yes' in an historical study about the 12th century siege of Lisbon into a 'no', and as a consequence his life drastically changes, but not history. It's a brillant idea and Saramago has converted into an entertaining love story. The deeper message is that you can't change history, but you can change your own life if you only take a little risk.
Saramago has turned this story into a very elaborate, ingenious piece of writing, with continuous leaping between present and past, giving the impression that the present seems to influence the past (the corrector writes an alternative history of the siege), but in the end everything turns out the same (the city falls). All this mumbo jumbo is bit too ingenious to my taste. And again Saramago's 'tumbling' writing style (page long sentences full of clauses and commentaries) just isn't my thing. I had this feeling also with the 2 other books of him I've read. But, still, I'll keep trying...
(rating 2.5 stars)

Ca întotdeauna la José Saramago, personajul principal al cărții este Naratorul, mereu inventiv, pus pe șotii și digresiuni, plin de umor și de bună dispoziție. Se exprimă numai în vorbe de duh, uneori devine agasant, dar îi putem îngădui orice, are farmec.

Naratorul îl urmărește exclusiv, obsedat, doar pe Raimundo Silva, corectorul care pune un NU într-o cronică medievală și apoi e nevoit să redacteze o istorie diferită a asediului Lisabonei. Uneori, naratorul se depărtează de Raimondo Silva, alteori pare a locui chiar în mintea corectorului. Totul se termină cu bine. Portughezii cuceresc cetatea. Raimundo Silva o cucerește pe Maria Sara, cea care-i sugerase ideea istoriei paralele. Nu-mi dau seama cine e mai cîștigat.

Saramago a afirmat că unul dintre modelele sfiosului, reticentului Raimundo a fost el însuși. E bine să-l credem pe cuvînt. Romanul a apărut în 1989. A fost primit cu elogii unanime. Criticii anglo-saxoni (cei mai influenți dintre toți) au vorbit tot mai insistent de un premiu Nobel. Saramago l-a luat în 1998. Nu a fost, desigur, un premiu nemeritat.

Transcriu doar un fragment:

Corectorul consultă „Dicţionarul de Rarităţi, Ciudăţenii şi Curiozităţi, unde, admirabilă coincidenţă care pică la țanc în această aventuroasă relatare, se dă ca exemplu de eroare afirmaţia înţeleptului Aristotel că musca domestică obişnuită are patru picioare, reducţie aritmetică pe care autorii următori au tot repetat-o veac după veac, deşi copiii aflaseră de mult, datorită cruzimii şi experimentului, că picioarele muştei sînt şase la număr, din vremea lui Aristotel le smulgeau cu voluptate, numărînd, unu, doi, trei, patru, cinci, şase, dar aceiaşi copii, cînd creşteau şi ajungeau să-l citească pe învăţatul grec, îşi spuneau unul altuia, Musca are patru picioare. Iată de ce este capabilă autoritatea magistrală”.

If at first a little tiring, this book certainly makes up for its somewhat unconventional style. As fiction, the story is engaging, but it's the places the text goes in the direction of challenging the orthodoxy of historical writing that is truly memorable. The sacredness of print, the linearity of time (to say nothing of the sentence), and even the value of proofreading (in more ways than one) are all thrown out the window. This is historical fiction at its best.

این کتاب که در بین کتاب‌های ساراماگو چندان مشهور نیست از حیث نوع روایت و زاویه دید رمانی قابل تامل است.
داستان به دو بخش تاریخی محاصره لیسبون و توصیف جزئیات آن دوره(که انصافاً به زیبایی پرداخت شده) و ماجرای عاشقانه مصحح کتاب تاریخ محاصره لیسبون تقسیم شده که به تناسب روایت در هر دو دوره در جریان است.
اما نکته ظریف ماجرا اینجاست که شما همزمان دو کتاب تاریخ محاصره لیسبون را مطالعه می‌کنید کتابی درون کتابی دیگر!

کتاب بشدت خسته کننده و کند پیش میرفت و تموم کردنش مث کابوس شده بود واسم
داستان درهم و روایت چندداستان باهم و موضوعات گاها بی ربط و نویسنده که نتونسته بود از پس پیشبرد داستان خوب عمل کنه " این هم از اراده خیرخواهانه ای بود که ما را وامیدارد تا چیزی را تحمل کنیم که تنها حسنش این است که تحمل ناپذیر (ٌ290)" است
واقعا تحمل ناپذیر

William Faulkner - King of endless paragraphs and phobic of punctuation - surfaces in the guise of Saramago. This author (better known for "Blindness" and "All The Names", and rightfully so) does certainly have a way with words and weaves philosophy, historiography and The Crusades through what is billed as a "love story". That the protagonist indeed begins a love affair with his newly-appointed manager is indisputible. What I contest is that this is in any way a remarkable development or an emphasis of the book. It was slow going until I "cracked the code" of the linguistic style Saramago employs to generate fluidity of narrative time-space and imbalance in the reader; once that improved I did enjoy the novel more. Still, I cannot recommend it enthusiastically to others as worth the time and effort.