Posted 1 year, 1 month ago at 9:39 pm. 0 comments
Saramago, Jose. Blindness.
Rating: 
This is an excellent book, rewarding the attention paid to it. At it’s core it may seem a simple and oft told allegory about how humanity sees, but doesn’t see and how thin the veneer of civility and governance truly is. This is an allegory and message worth retelling though as those caught in the conflict in Gaza, caught between two sides who see, but who do not see, must surely attest. It takes a skilled storyteller, however, to plant the seed of this allegory in your mind and encourage it to bloom, albeit into a twisted and poisonous growth, rather than a flower.
The story is of a group of people who seem to go blind. However, their blindness has no physical cause, nor it is a blackness instead it is a white sickness, a veil of white mist that slides like a filter in between their minds and what exists. As the contagion spreads, both the concrete infrastructure and fine threads of society are crushed in the desperation to at first evade the contagion, and then simply survive. As Saramago states humans are half indifferent, half malice and this is not an edifying combination.
Only one woman, a doctor’s wife, remains immune and it is her who guides a small group from the very depths of human depravity towards some sort of redemption. We are aware at times of the broader impact on society, but Saramago concentrates on this microcscopic group at the epicentre of the initial infection and the first to be quarantined. We gradually learn who they are, but part of our blindness is that we never know their names. They are referred to throughout by their defining place in the story’s timeline, and yet we know these people intimately by the end. We have witnessed their suffering, their degredation and been forced to consider how quickly we could be forcd to decide what we too would do to survive.
Saramago’s style is initially disconcerting: the nameless characters, long sentences and paragraphs, dialogue interwoven into the paragraph rather than distinct. It is like a huge flood of words jammed together as though there is too much to say. Once adjusted to this style, and once free of the strictures of style and structure you start to see and hear the lyrical quality of the words and pick out who is speaking, who is thinking based from within the torrent of words. It is an incredibly sophisticated technique and is almost musical.
As I was reading the words seemed to rise into arresting, shattering noise, and retreat into the sush of calm and dragged me along with it. There were moments of high drama, moments of exposition and from the swirling rhythm of the text came the structure and the tonal accents that made for a rich and satisfying experience. It was like a symphony and so for all the shocking violence and disgust of the subject matter I couldn’t help but enjoying it, enjoying our ability we have through art to hold the mirror up to who we are and force ourselves to recognise ourselves as human: art confirms the best of ourselves even when describing the worst of ourselves. As such it is like the dogoftears that dries our eyes when we weep at a world of our making.
Blindness has this brilliant ‘structure of feeling‘, to reference Raymond Williams, expressed through this very musical tonality that makes it work. Having missed it in the cinema it will be really interesting to watch the film when it comes out on DVD to see how well that has translated into the visual image. If it doesn’t survive the translation, then I imagine the film could be grim indeed.
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 9:53 pm. 0 comments
Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile, Geraint Anderson. (Headline, 2008)
Rating: 
Geraint Anderson, the London Paper’s cityboy columnist, writes up his 12 years in the City. His candid take on the highs and lows of city life is eye opening. you’d like to hope the caricatures he draws are exaggerated, but suspect the reality is not much. So, the effect is like someone writing amusingly about a horrifying car crash. You want to close your eyes, don’t want to crash and yet you look on with mind incredulous at what is unfolding. The effect is the moral equivalent of poking yourself in the eye over and over again, which makes it hard to say this book was ‘enjoyable’.
What it did tell me personally was that I’m glad I don’t measure my life in terms of success, or money, and whilst I may still say to myself that I don’t measure myself in terms of success and money, that what matters most is waking happy and falling asleep happy and that I jumped from the blue chip gravy train early on in my career I still haven’t jumped as far as my friend who spent her summer doing the job she enjoyed most ever – teaching people how to sail in Greece for a pittance. Still, I sometimes feel that what I do is..well..not pointless exactly but doesn’t energise and obsess me as much as I thought it would. I have a sneaking suspicion I’d rather be an architect or a developer, than an analyst . I just don’t know how to do that as well.I get too distracted by the joys of XML when I should be trying to herd cats write up business processes .
Anyway all that is a bit tangenital for a review of a book about city life. Despite a creeping culture of corporatism in higher education I’m still glad that at least I do something that is less destructive to my self and to society that the financial services industry at it’s worst and all through this book I just kept giving thanks that wasn’t my life. So if my life somedaysdoesn’t feel quite right – most days it doesn’t feel far wrong either which is not necessarily what you could say about the morally rapacious, coke snorting, sexually promiscuous idiots Anderson depicts.
Whereas most of cityboy just made me feel like the world is screwed. Anderson is acute enough to ask, really ask, despite all this to aks really, why aren’t we revolting and the iniquity and stupidity of it all. Bread and circuses is given as one reason, perhaps another is that these really big numbers are just totally meaningless to people and we can only get all outraged about financial things we can really relate to – like mind numbing conversations about how to split restaurant bills. If we put as much energy into that as we do to the rest of the economy surely we wouldn’t be in this mess.
The part of this book that struck me most was when cityboy called on Hegel: “history teaches us that history teaches us nothing” and we really are suffering short term memory loss as the cycles of boom and bust shorten. The world is probably split into those who enjoy this roller coaster, and those who think something a bit more simple and sustainable might be in order – and those like Anderson who have had the dubious (?) pleasure of being both.
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 1:40 pm. 0 comments
The Children of Freedom, Marc Levy. (Harper, 2008)
Rating: 
Children of Freedom is a compelling story that must be told. It is a tale of how children lost their youth to resist the occupation of France and, branded terrorists, fought for a cause they believed in. If you are the occupier then such partisans are undermining the forces of law and order; if you are the occupied and have imposed on you a law and an order you do not believe is just then you are the heroes of a just cause. How complicated this political morality is and how difficult to find ourselves once of the side of the occupied now on the side of occupier, still believing our cause is just. Guantanomo Bay, Abu Ghraib: these acts let us down. Still they are nothing compared to the misery and suffering that was inflicted on continental Europe in the middle of the last century.
This story touches on the extent of the suffering, mind boggling numbers of the dead, the displaced, the tortured, the damaged, but narrows the story in order to deepen it to the story of one partisan brigade operating in Toulouse. It follows the thread of two brothers’ lives as they feel compelled to resist, as they face torture and imprisonment, and onwards to their final journey towards Dachau. It is almost inconceivable that man can inflict such degredation and pain upon another man, for whatever cause; and yet the suffering that human beings are able to endure is quite remarkable.
If all this seems a bit depressing, then strangely it’s not. This is a story about hope and resilience as well. We must face the horror in our histories to guide us in treading more carefully in future, we should hold onto the testimonies of courage, hope and the small acts of human kindness, in the face of fear, to remind ourselves of all that is good in human nature, and how this can endure even when confronted with hardship and evil. Our current ‘crisis’ is nothing of the sort compared to the gnawing of hunger at a truly emaciated body, or the gnawing of lost families, love and freedom at the soul.
Yet we survive, we carry on and we try and make the next chapter of our story that bit better for the generations that succeed us. This is the message of hope, this is what people fight for.
In the early stages Marc Levy nearly fails to do justice to his material. He initially didn’t strike me as as storyteller who could match his story. In places in the first part, Levy struggles to find the right tone in attempting to tie his story between the factual waypoints and so he veers between tedious documentary, that risks deadening the reality, and cross cutting between scenes that almost has too much of an eye on the cinematic. However, as the book proceeds Levy grows more adept at how to tell his tale, and throughout the later parts he begins to find words that really pierce the imagination and touch the emotion. The third and final part is truly gripping as the prisoners search for the slimmest chance of survival as they hurtle towards death and destruction. This book will leave you humbled.
