Worthy of Trust

Ursula LeGuin on Jose Saramago:
Some years ago a reliable friend told me I should read Jose Saramago's Blindness. Faced with pages of run-on sentences and unparagraphed dialogue without quotation marks, I soon quit, snarling about literary affectations. Later I tried again, went further, and quit because I was scared. Blindness is a frightening book. Before I'd let an author of such evident power give me the horrors, he'd have to earn my trust. So I went back to the earlier novels and put myself through a course of Saramago.

It's hard not to gallop through prose that uses commas instead of full stops, but once I learned to slow down, the rewards piled up: his sound, sweet humour, his startling imagination, his admirable dogs and lovers, the subtle, honest workings of his mind. Here indeed was a novelist worthy of a reader's trust.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

The Snowtown Murders