I have to hand it to Saramago--no one else writes like he does; no, he is not a cheap Kafka knock-off as I wrote before, he is his own man. I am not in love with his style, but it really is his style.
His humor--at times I love it, particularly the little side comments that have nothing to do with the development of the plot and turn the novel inside out--at least, they leave the reader dangling upside down instead of bouncing along happily with the author. For instance, the narrator remarks at one point about the envy felt in the Central Registry when the boss singles out the central character for special treatment: "What else could one expect, the human soul being what we know it to be, though we cannot claim to know anything." Taken out of context it's not nearly as funny, but suffice it to say that Saramago weaves these little meandering moments into the plot like a person making a table who suddenly decides it should have a shoe sticking out of the middle of it.
At other times, I find it all a bit cloying or heavyhanded. Certain long passages in which the main character imagines dialogues with various people in his life, or improbable outcomes to certain escapades on which he embarks--those passages could be pruned back a little without losing their comic appeal (I find myself skipping ahead at these points). But that's not a major criticism.
Overall, I give him much higher marks than I did in my previous post about him, although I'm still not convinced that he's Nobel Prize material...but I've only read half of one of his books, so I'm not much of a judge of that.
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