Saramago's Curious Style
Timothy Sullivan
in Books, Writing, Spain, Fiction
1 Comment
While on Christmas vacation I read The Stone Raft, my first encounter with the unusual style of Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. The stone raft of the title refers to the Iberian peninsula, which is set adrift in the Atlantic Ocean after the Pyrenees mountains split down the middle. The novel focuses on a journey across Iberia taken by five people, all of whom have had experiences that, like the sudden crackup of the Pyrenees, defy the laws of the physical universe.
More intriguing to me, however, than this fantastic plot is the style in which Saramago writes. He pays little heed to the conventions of usage and punctuation, and the run-on sentence structure he employs takes some getting used to. But his ideas, imagery, and affection for his characters were all very attractive to me. Here's just one example of his style, a sentence I particularly like ("Deux Chevaux" is the Citroen car in which the characters travel):
"And what I'd like to know is what moves inside us and where does it go, no, I'm not talking about worms, microbes, bacteria, those living creatures that inhabit us, I'm referring to something else, something that moves and perhaps moves us at the same time, just as constellation, galaxy, solar system, sun, earth, sea, peninsula, and Deux Chevaux move and move us with them, what is the name, finally, of the thing that moves all the rest, from one end of the chain to the other, or perhaps there is no chain and the universe is a ring at once so thin that apparently only we and what is inside us fit into it and so thick that it can accommodate the maximum dimension of the universe, which is the ring itself, what is the name of what follows after us."
Wow.
Spoken Words
Timothy Sullivan
in Journalism, Radio, Media, Sirius
1 Comment
I was the substitute host of a talk-radio show called Court TV Morning on Sirius Satellite Radio from spring of 2006 until it was discontinued at the close of 2007. Because the show aired on the Court TV channel, the overall theme was crime/legal news, but I did my best to stretch the topics into the realms of politics and international affairs whenever possible.
I had a blast. The talk-radio format is wonderful because of the freedom it allows, the copious amounts of time available, and the opportunity to have serious discussions with a wide range of guests, including not only trial lawyers and legal scholars, but authors and experts on all manner of subjects. Having been a TV correspondent and producer for many years, and a print reporter and editor long before that, I've found radio to be a relaxed and more accommodating medium. It's a lot easier to produce than TV, and one can get much deeper into more complex subject matter than is the case on TV, what with the absurdly short attention span television imposes on talent and viewers alike.
At the end of this post you'll find a podcast that includes the highlights from a few of my more energetic radio rants. Topics include the notorious shoe-bomber Richard Reid, the question of whether the US tortures terrorism suspects, and the State Department's use of mercenaries in Iraq. By the way, the other voices you'll hear are those of two pals of mine, Glen Jones, a DJ on WFMU radio out of New Jersey, and Bob Regan, who ran Court TV's News Center.