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A review by copdisrespecter
The Lives of Things by José Saramago
3.0
I liked this enough, enough to want to read Blindness since this is my first of his (early, less developed, by nature short) and I expect it to be a better version of this. Some things not expressed in other reviews so here I am:
The Chair - A fun if not tedious microscopic view of the few seconds before during and after the fall of Salazar. The temporal aspect is interesting, to focus so much on a single moment that has, to its contrary, a long (2 year) fatal impact. Saramago's focus on the chair, it's material, the physics beneath its breaking, etc., all bring a crude determinacy of cause-and-effect to the Salazar's literals downfall-- something I consider to illustrate above all an attitude that Saramago holds for Salazar specifically and icons of power in general.
Embargo - There's something here about the displacement of human desire onto the appendage of organismic machinery and tools. The cars being a necessity of daily life, the petrol-energy being (as if) the fuel of the protagonist's body. The control that scarcity of resources (and thus geopolitics, the market, etc.) have on our being. And finally the psycho-emotional aversion to work that one only half-heartedly attempts to suppress.
Reflux - I'd echo everything others here have said about the dichotomy between life and death, the futile desire to expel all of death's semblances, and how one pole folds itself back upon its counterpart once it's become too suppressed or imbalanced. Life invites death, and death, life. Etc. Pretty. Also, the childish and sociopathic projects of Kings, not so divorced from reality actually.
Things - Really a highlight here, simply because it ties together to detailedness of Saramago with his quirkiness, but this time with a clarity that I think will tickle the brains of even the most passive readers. Something about alienation, and the dead labor embedded in all of our objects, all of our possessions, and the controlled/controlling paranoia of those things, and of humans/citizens/workers, in the economy. How such systems fall apart, how they resist themselves in order to fall apart. Revolutionary impulse felt by the unsuspecting citizen as his ideological conditioning gets withered away bit-by-bit with every "I'm sure everything is fine" and "surely everything is under control" sentiment.
The Centaur - Never before have I considered the internal tension that something half human/half horse might feel; that perhaps a centaur wouldn't feel a singular subjectivity but rather two varying ones that both agitate and compromise for each other. This is fun and beautiful, up to the end when the supposedly more-thinking human half reacts with the automaticity often prescribed to nonhuman animals. The tension between village and wilderness, man and gods, man and mystical beasts, dreams and fate and reconciliation and resolution and the tragic impossibility of happy endings all come together with the peacefulness of dreams.
Revenge - As most people have said here, this one is elusive. Short. Disturbing, though there's something so libidinal about the seemingly disparate parts being held together. I haven't seen any reviews that try to say anything about it at all, so I'll try. There's something here, maybe about boyhood, but also also the pubescent experience of young adults in general. The imaginative and charged narratives that minds spin while in the throes of hormonal development. This is what I'm ascribing something libidinal. The boy and girl witness each other at opposite sides of a river, swimming, un/dressing. The witnessing of the pig's castration. That forming a tension, wound up, perhaps uncomfortable like a hurt/wounded ego that inversely spurs on a sort of confidence to 'do something, anything' when you don't know what it is that you're supposed to do, and so that thing you do is to lean inward toward the tension and to see it through... all of that relieved in the motivation to undress yet again at the river as the girl mirrors the same. To cross the river, to lean in, to find out, that is the revenge for the pig, who will not be directed at all anymore by its hormonal life. And of course, the girl runs off - no one said they were supposed to meet. Another lesson.
The Chair - A fun if not tedious microscopic view of the few seconds before during and after the fall of Salazar. The temporal aspect is interesting, to focus so much on a single moment that has, to its contrary, a long (2 year) fatal impact. Saramago's focus on the chair, it's material, the physics beneath its breaking, etc., all bring a crude determinacy of cause-and-effect to the Salazar's literals downfall-- something I consider to illustrate above all an attitude that Saramago holds for Salazar specifically and icons of power in general.
Embargo - There's something here about the displacement of human desire onto the appendage of organismic machinery and tools. The cars being a necessity of daily life, the petrol-energy being (as if) the fuel of the protagonist's body. The control that scarcity of resources (and thus geopolitics, the market, etc.) have on our being. And finally the psycho-emotional aversion to work that one only half-heartedly attempts to suppress.
Reflux - I'd echo everything others here have said about the dichotomy between life and death, the futile desire to expel all of death's semblances, and how one pole folds itself back upon its counterpart once it's become too suppressed or imbalanced. Life invites death, and death, life. Etc. Pretty. Also, the childish and sociopathic projects of Kings, not so divorced from reality actually.
Things - Really a highlight here, simply because it ties together to detailedness of Saramago with his quirkiness, but this time with a clarity that I think will tickle the brains of even the most passive readers. Something about alienation, and the dead labor embedded in all of our objects, all of our possessions, and the controlled/controlling paranoia of those things, and of humans/citizens/workers, in the economy. How such systems fall apart, how they resist themselves in order to fall apart. Revolutionary impulse felt by the unsuspecting citizen as his ideological conditioning gets withered away bit-by-bit with every "I'm sure everything is fine" and "surely everything is under control" sentiment.
The Centaur - Never before have I considered the internal tension that something half human/half horse might feel; that perhaps a centaur wouldn't feel a singular subjectivity but rather two varying ones that both agitate and compromise for each other. This is fun and beautiful, up to the end when the supposedly more-thinking human half reacts with the automaticity often prescribed to nonhuman animals. The tension between village and wilderness, man and gods, man and mystical beasts, dreams and fate and reconciliation and resolution and the tragic impossibility of happy endings all come together with the peacefulness of dreams.
Revenge - As most people have said here, this one is elusive. Short. Disturbing, though there's something so libidinal about the seemingly disparate parts being held together. I haven't seen any reviews that try to say anything about it at all, so I'll try. There's something here, maybe about boyhood, but also also the pubescent experience of young adults in general. The imaginative and charged narratives that minds spin while in the throes of hormonal development. This is what I'm ascribing something libidinal. The boy and girl witness each other at opposite sides of a river, swimming, un/dressing. The witnessing of the pig's castration. That forming a tension, wound up, perhaps uncomfortable like a hurt/wounded ego that inversely spurs on a sort of confidence to 'do something, anything' when you don't know what it is that you're supposed to do, and so that thing you do is to lean inward toward the tension and to see it through... all of that relieved in the motivation to undress yet again at the river as the girl mirrors the same. To cross the river, to lean in, to find out, that is the revenge for the pig, who will not be directed at all anymore by its hormonal life. And of course, the girl runs off - no one said they were supposed to meet. Another lesson.