false 1739 2526 0156007757 9780156007757 2665 <![CDATA[Blindness]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1161054077m/2526.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1161054077s/2526.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2526.Blindness 3.99 15986
As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.

In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.

Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.

And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber]]> 1285555 3.91 30613 4556 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1998 6085389 1417706120 9781417706129 0 <![CDATA[Gospel According to Jesus Christ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6085389.Gospel_According_to_Jesus_Christ 5.00 1 </div>]]> 1285555 3.91 30613 4556 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1991 762390 0811211908 9780811211901 56 <![CDATA[The Hour of the Star (New Directions Paperbook)]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178135476m/762390.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178135476s/762390.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/762390.The_Hour_of_the_Star 3.97 540 Mais Macabea, an ugly, sickly girl from a poverty-stricken northeastern province who makes her way to Rio de Janeiro, finds marginal work as a typist with a company that distributes pulley equipment, and shares a squalid room in the red-light district with four other girls. She barely knows she exists: ""I am a typist and a virgin, and I like Coca-Cola,"" she tells herself firmly, but soon she's adrift without an anchor of identity in a world that is utterly beyond her comprehension. She meets a shallow young man named Olympico de Jesus, but drives him crazy with her non sequiturs (""I love nuts and bolts. How about you?""), and he finally leaves her for Gloria, a femme fatale who works in her office. Trying to do something positive, Macabea goes to a callous quack of a doctor for a physical--the man tells her she's in the early stages of pulmonary tuberculosis, and prescribes ""Italian spaghetti"" to counter her weight loss before kicking her out of his office. Searching for one last glimmer of hope, Macabea borrows money and goes to see an ex-prostitute fortune-teller named Madame Carlota, who assures her: ""Your life is about to change completely. . . You are about to come in for a great fortune that a foreign gentleman will bring to you in the night."" Leaving the old charlatan's house, Macabea is struck down and killed by a yellow Mercedes. This is Lispector's last novel (first published in Brazil in the year of her death, 1977) and, all in all, a painful but lovely testimony to her superb talents.
]]> 86098 4.10 1628 139 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1977 7071404 1417706562 9781417706563 0 <![CDATA[Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7071404-year-of-the-death-of-ricardo-reis 4.33 3 ]]> 1285555 3.91 30613 4556 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1986 761351 0292724489 9780292724488 8 <![CDATA[Family Ties (Texas Pan American Series)]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178130567m/761351.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178130567s/761351.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/761351.Family_Ties 4.04 109 "Reading Clarice Lispector's novels is like listening to a stranger unravel her thoughts and then walk out of the door, leaving behind a strong sense of character but few facts about daily life.You wonder after meeting such a person whether she was real or imagined—and then decide it does not matter."—Belles Lettres

The silent rage that seizes a matriarch whose family is feting her eighty-ninth year.The tangle of emotions felt by a sophisticated young woman toward her elderly mother. An adolescent girl's obsessive fear of being looked at. The "giddying sense of compassion" that a blind man introduces into a young housewife's settled existence. Of such is made the world of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer whose finest work is acknowledged to be her exquisitely crafted short stories. Here, in these thirteen of Lispector's most brilliantly conceived stories, mysterious and unexpected moments of crisis propel characters to self-discovery or keenly felt intuitions about the human condition. Her characters mirror states of mind. Alienated by their unsettling sense of life's absurdity, they seem at times absorbed in their interior lives and in the passions that dominate and usually defeat them.

]]> 86098 4.10 1628 139 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1973 153435 0811211894 9780811211895 2 <![CDATA[Foreign Legion: Stories and Chronicles (New Directions Paperbook)]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172250352m/153435.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172250352s/153435.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153435.Foreign_Legion_Stories_and_Chronicles 4.11 45 86098 4.10 1628 139 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1986 153421 0811213404 9780811213400 5 <![CDATA[Selected Cronicas (New Directions Paperbook, 834)]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172250338m/153421.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172250338s/153421.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153421.Selected_Cronicas 4.33 40 Selected Crônicas gathers the newspaper columns of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. This collection captures Lispector's gifted voice and supplies a view of Brazil from her childhood, after her Ukrainian parents emigrated there, until the last of her columns in 1973. The stories in this volume are colored with childhood memories and a belief in the redemptive promise of justice. Brazilian newspapers have a history of intellectual journalism, although the period during which Lispector wrote these crônicas was defined by military dictatorship, censorship of the press, and political repression. It was also a time of rapid economic growth, and amid these varied pressures, she played the role of conscience, reminding her readers of unshakeable memories and unmovable truths. What Lispector had to say could only be conveyed in a literary manner for the most pragmatic of reasons, but her delightful stories suggest it was the best means no matter what she had been permitted.]]> 86098 4.10 1628 139 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1996 1143300 1857540190 9781857540192 1 <![CDATA[The Red House]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1143300.The_Red_House 3.00 1 517135 3.32 22 1 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1994 3627495 0080133274 9780080133270 0 <![CDATA[An Anthology of Brazilian Modernist Poetry]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3627495.An_Anthology_of_Brazilian_Modernist_Poetry 0.0 0 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1969 7226995 0856357758 9780856357756 0 <![CDATA[Hour of the Star]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7226995-hour-of-the-star 0.0 0 86098 4.10 1628 139 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1987 6554951 1852421223 9781852421229 0 <![CDATA[Devil's Trill]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6554951-devil-s-trill 0.0 0 350743 5.00 1 0 1739 3.99 17135 2826 1988