Sleep, Sun and Saramago

This will not be a highly focused post...

The kid slept until 10:15 this morning. Unprecedented. True, he went to bed at 9:30 pm last night, which is also unusual; but he's never slept past 9 am before, much less 10 am. I kept checking on him during the last hour and a half of this 12 and a half hour slumberfest to make sure he was okay (yes, he was fine, of course). He woke up in a wonderful, ebullient mood. I doubt this means, however, that I should put him to bed late every night. Tonight he got to bed at the more reasonable time of 8:15, and I'm predicting he'll sleep his normal 11 hours or so.

For a few hours this afternoon, the sun popped out and did its best to warm that section of Earth known as San Francisco. I say this because we've hardly seen the sun or felt its warmth since returning from Maine; I've been told that it has been gloomy and cold for the last three weeks. Enough to make anyone want to go to bed for twelve and a half hours.

Or at least, crawl into bed and read, which I'll be doing in the next ten minutes. I'm reading a book by Jose Saramago, All the Names, in which a low-level functionary in a fictitious Central Registry suddenly becomes obsessed with finding out everything he can about one particular person, someone he's never met but whose card randomly ends up in his hands. It's about loneliness, the desire to connect, and the desire to remain anonymous--the push-pull of all human relations.

I love the central idea, but find Saramago's style slightly oppressive; it's not the lack of commas and other punctuation (for which he is famous), it's that in this story which has very little forward momentum (after the humor of the situation has died off a bit) the author makes little attempt to make the character or the plot more interesting. Also, the tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek tone of the novel doesn't work for me, somehow. It's almost like I'm listening to Kafka tell a traditional joke. Which might work if I were sitting across from him at a restaurant, but it wouldn't fit too well in one of his novels. Similarly with Saramago--the situation of his central character is "joke" enough, he doesn't need to poke us in the ribs at the same time.

But anyway...my eyes are closing; off to bed.