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What is a good book for AW discussion? (Nominations pool)
By Gertie · 65 posts · 218 views
By Gertie · 65 posts · 218 views
last updated Oct 18, 2025 05:31PM
What Members Thought
powerful story of city vs rural, capitalism vs freedom, creativity vs profit, nature vs sterile modernity, and mostly love vs despair, youth vs aging. It is parents and children and people and animals. (Probably first book I ever liked with prominent dog character.)
Saramago writes without much in the way of punctuation, which in this case adds to the sense of the people, regular working people, struggling to come to terms with powerful contradictions within and around.
Saramago writes without much in the way of punctuation, which in this case adds to the sense of the people, regular working people, struggling to come to terms with powerful contradictions within and around.
I did really love this book, but it's not one you read for the story. I lost count of the number of times I read passages aloud or wrote them down to remember. It's just beautifully written, so much so that you don't mind that the story doesn't really go much of anywhere.
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Overall I enjoyed the narrative, characters, and dialog. However I found the simplistic ending painful and just wrong. It felt as if the author was told to complete the book quickly and acted hastily by borrowing from an existing work, introducing silly metaphors to tie it together.
It took a few tries to get into. Certainly not as good as Blindness--but I'm wondering whose fault it is that my exposure to Plato and his cave (20 years ago in an AP history followed by a post-read wikipedia look-up) doesn't make me appreciate it any more.
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Mmmmmmm.
What a great writer.
Novel prize for this book, and for 'Blindness'.
As to why these are such great books, I'd suggest you read them on your own.
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What a great writer.
Novel prize for this book, and for 'Blindness'.
As to why these are such great books, I'd suggest you read them on your own.
...more
Aug 16, 2008
Monika
marked it as to-read
Sep 24, 2008
MichelleCH
marked it as to-read
Oct 03, 2008
Dylan
marked it as to-read
Feb 09, 2009
Kelly Sandberg
marked it as to-read
Mar 26, 2013
Marjan
marked it as to-read
Mar 19, 2018
Debra Harrison
rated it
it was amazing
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review of another edition
Shelves:
books-i-own
May 02, 2018
Netanella
marked it as to-read
May 22, 2018
Dani
marked it as to-read
May 11, 2019
Jessi
marked it as to-read
May 14, 2020
Sean
marked it as to-read
Jun 08, 2022
Sabrina
marked it as to-read
Jun 08, 2022
Kris Holland
marked it as to-read
Jun 08, 2022
Aimee
marked it as to-read
