Saramago's novels are never straightforward. In The Stone Raft, the Iberian peninsula separates from the mainland of Europe and floats into the sea. Why? What causes it? What does it mean? The text contains no answers. The event itself is magical and inexplicable, the meat of the novel resting entirely in how people respond to it. With enough detail to make the impossible feel real, Saramago describes in macrocosm how the media, the populations of the peninsula and mainland, and the governments of the world respond. In microcosm, he also follows the lives of five ordinary people drawn together by the separation of the peninsula and other, smaller-scale magical events.

The novel is good -- it is Saramago afterall -- but I'm not sure yet what meaning to pull from it. The characters have the arc of their lives utterly altered by the events of the novel, but those events are catalysts, seeding their choices, not forcing them. The attention to detail, the realism the dialog, all of these things virtues in themselves, in total also make it more difficult to read a message behind the realism. Some of the satire is obvious, and Saramogo's keen psychology stands on its own, but all the same, I feel here like I'm missing something. Perhaps I'll find it when I visit this novel again.