![]() ![]() At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. Saramago tells his tale with humor and compassion, and with an imagination that is boundless enough to conjure an impossible epidemic without losing sight of the exigencies of actual life, achieving that rare blend of magic and reality in which the fantastical allows us to see our own world more clearly, from a perspective that brings out details we might not have otherwise considered. ![]() OK, so maybe the book is a little dark - all right, more than a little dark - but it's also a rollicking adventure story, and a love story, and a story of triumph over adversity. In 2005, when I heard the horror stories that were coming out of New Orleans' Superdome in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it was chilling how closely they matched the experiences of Saramago's quarantined characters, but it was also thrilling: Here was a writer who had gotten it right, who had nailed human nature so precisely that the real world was mirroring what his imagination had conjured, under slightly different circumstances, years before. Saramago was the first Portuguese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. ![]()
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