I will not be reading Jose Saramago's penultimate novel afterall.
I picked it up a couple weeks ago, the true story of an elephant walking from Lisbon to Vienna in 1551 to be a wedding gift to Emperor Maximillian sounded like it might be an interesting story.
But alas, the author has chosen to eschew capitalization, and quotation marks. Without such landmarks of readability I find myself struggling to comprehend the continuous jumbled e e cummings narrative, with a lot of unfamiliar names and place names and nothing to delineate them. Plus the author uses a very chatty, familiar tone which I find cloying.
So I'm pulling out at ten pages. Saramago's "Blindness" I read -- and hated -- a few years ago. I guess I'm just too old these days to waste any of my precious remaining time on authors' conceit.
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