The History of the Siege of Lisbon - Jose Saramago

It is time that we should know the person about whom we have been talking indiscreetly, if name and surnames could ever add anything useful to the normal identifying features and other statistics, age, height, weight, morphological type, skin tone, colour of eyes, whether the hair is smooth, curly, or wavy, or has simply disappeared, timbre of voice, clear or harsh, weight, characteristic gestures, manner of walking, since experience of human relationships has shown that, once apprised of these details and sometimes many more, not even this information serves any purpose, nor are we capable of imagining what might be missing.

This book is a challenge to read and only worth the effort if you are a student of literature. The style includes extremely long sentences and paragraphs. For example, the book starts out with a one sentence paragraph which covers six pages. I counted seventy-one commas in another sentence which was just one page long. The translator says the stream of thought style provides a stronger sense of interaction and diverse interpretation. The diversity in interpretation perhaps comes from not remembering where a sentence began or what subject is being presented.

I wanted to like this book. It has a great premise: a proofreader alters history by changing a work in an author's manuscript and falls in love with an editor. Interspersed is a tale inserted into a historical time reinterpreting the Seige of Lisbon against the Moors. The author is a great thinker as well as a writer and there are brilliant thoughts and phrases in this book. For me, however, it is far too complicated to read and meanders off into too many uninteresting tangents.