Tuesday, 27 September 2011

Reviews Of Books I've Never Read

Blindness by Jose Saramago
To research his book, Jose Saramago, feigned blindness by using welder's goggles and then had his landlady, Mrs. Smutz, who really was blind, lead him around the quaint town of Chorizocojones on the Catalan coastline, dropping into shop after shop and through touch alone, having him try to identify different types of sausages and salamis. It's this type of dedication to his work and definitive research that earned him the Nobel Prize.
They say love is blind. And so are bats. And many moles in strong sunlight. So, what is it to be blind? Is there a correlation between love, bats and moles? Does this tell us something about not having sight? Does this help us identify different types of salamis? And if a bat falls in love with a mole and they should mate, will the two blindesses cancel each other out and the offspring (boles? mats?) have super-vision? It's unfortunate that Mr. Saramago doesn't touch on subjects and ponderous thoughts such as these and frankly, for me, calls into question the whole Nobel Prize committee (were they blind to these neglected theories and philosophical leanings), but nevertheless, his book isn't half-bad. If you're one of those that sees the glass as half full instead of half empty. That is, if you can see at all.
It's amazing that Saramago's novel was awarded the Nobel Prize while that of author Samson Ordenbrauer's great work, The Twilight of the Balloon Spleen, was so sadly overlooked. Pictured above is Mr. Ordenbrauer holding a replica of the main character of his novel that his wife, Gretchen, so lovingly created for him and which he kept on his desk next to his typewriter for inspiration, a balloon spleen with a human brain that intercepts and decodes a series of secret messages from Hitler's SS to his troops positioned around Stalingrad, passing them on to the Russians and thus helps to save the city and end the war, vanquishing Germany.
And kudos to him for writing about a touchy subject that's been around since Oedipus plucked out his own eyes over that whole thing with his father and mother and not wearing any underwear and stealing the family's vacation money and playing Charades with the Sphinx. Actually, when you think about it, this has been cannon fodder for novelists, playwrights and psychoanalysts alike, so I guess there's an upside to plucking out one's eyes from a historical and posterity perspective.
Now, I'm not one for leaning heavily on the cane of irony as it were and then using it to tap, tap, tap my way down the street blindly with only the echoing laughs and harrumphs of recognition at the sheer coincidence of seemingly non-connected events coming together to guide me down a sidewalk littered with more debris than you can shake a cane at with hands stiff and arthritic from masturbatory revelry, but I'd be a cat trying to cover its scat on a marble floor if this book didn't whack me upside the head with its literal transference from concept to killing machine. For, it appears to me, when I flick on the bathroom light in the middle of the night, those devious devils, the silverfish, that have haunted me for many years, freeze, blind it seems, because when I approach them with this book, angled at a degree for maximum striking velocity, they don't move an inch. No flex of antennae or movement of one of their many, hideous legs and I can only believe, as I am about to hit them with a copy of Blindness, that they themselves are temporarily blind and some kind of ironic justice is being served. Chalk one up for the iron fist of irony helping the blind to smite the blind and sending those silverfish back to Satan's laboratory where they were born, bred and fitted for spats.
Well, enough about my own philosophical ramblings. After all, we're here to discuss the book, not my silverfish problems and the chasms and schisms they create in the mind of a deep-thinker such as myself, especially after a bottle of cough syrup and some ham steak. Blindness has a real whizz-bang opening that's hard to ignore, even if you're drowsy with dextromethorphan and stray embers from your Meerschaum pipe are burning holes in your underwear. I mentioned moles and bats earlier and this is no coincidence because Blindness begins with a surprise attack by a group of Spanish anarchists known as the El Marmotas, whose resemblance to half-mole, half-bat entities is striking. Saramago based them on a real-life anarchist group in Spain, El Hombres Ardilla de Tierras, or the Ground-Mole Men. In two rare photographs pictured below, you can see how they used to get liquored up and then shoot their unsuspecting victims with their "Anarchy Blindness Gun." Firing liquified calamari indiscriminately into large crowds, these Ground-Mole Men were the scourge of many large cities in Spain for a good decade, blinding people temporarily with their liquid squid concoction and then raiding local stores for TVs, stereos and rubber gaskets and bathtub plugs.
A rare photo of El Hombres Ardilla de Tierras firing their Anarchy Blindness Gun into a unsuspecting crowd in Barcelona, circa 1965.
You can see the power of their weapon worn on the expression of the head honcho of El Hombres Ardilla de Tierras, Ibrahim Legumanzos, as he suffers the kickback from the burst of liquid squid.
So, with this dynamic opening, Saramago introduces two key elements into the flow of his barely begun novel; that of political anarchy in the hands of liquored-up little men who wouldn't look out of place French-kissing a groundhog or think twice about spraying you in the eyes with liquid squid, and an overwhelming blindness that settles on the citizenry of Madrid, spreading eventually to Barcelona and parts of Bulgaria and the Netherlands. Actually, it's there where the plague of blindness wreaks the most havoc as the Dutch, such avid bicyclists, suddenly struck blind, ride off the dikes in alarming numbers and are washed away into the Northern Sea. But Saramago centres his story primarily in Spain's two great cities and his initial descriptions of a group of friends in a tapas bar in Madrid, suddenly without sight and having to find their finger food with their fingers while squid juice drips from the ruins of their eyes, is as gut-wrenching as a plate of Patates Bravas with a chorizo chaser coming up in a bout of acid-reflux on a Magic Fingers bed.
The power of Patates Bravas on the esophagus with a Magic Fingers Vibrating unit as the catalyst is well demonstrated in this image featuring the author, Jose Saramago's wife, Valente, on a trip to Niagara Falls where Saramago was researching his uncompleted book, The Honeymoon of Drowned Souls. The drowning refers not to the Falls, but to a water-bed mishap that makes a widower of Alphonso Quintara, a zipper manufacturer from Seville, who, through his torment and sorrow, writes an opera about Niagra Falls and the tragic death of his new bride before they could even enjoy the Honeymoon Suite in the Maid of the Mist Motel.
Soon we learn it's not the work of the El Marmotas and their evil anarchy gun, but something far more sinister and much harder to control. For a massive asteroid has hit the earth, just outside of Barcelona in a deserted soccer stadium, perhaps part of a diabolical cosmic plan that's only hinted at in the initial pages, because on this asteroid exists millions of microscopic alien plant spores that, upon impact, are sent "flying like so many dandelion seeds, spinning and whirling like tiny helicopters of death, all innocence until their pollen clouds the corneas of the good citizens of Spain, eventually eating the jellied spheres of their eyeballs like PacMan on a murderous rampage." It's exactly these turns of phrase and this ability to drive metaphor and simile like a Fiat 500 through a crowded Barcelona street, that makes Saramago such a spectacular writer. Sure, he might hit a few pedestrians along the way, but they're blind and he's wearing welding goggles so who is to blame. In a court of law, this would have the jury out for days.
Anyway, the novel focuses on five people bonded in their blindness and love of gypsy curses and hypnotizing water fowl. Dr. Sergio Hamantashen, struck blind mid-operation, perforates his patient's bowel and during his surgical team's protestations, they too are suddenly blinded and then the patient dies and the surgical team is left to fend for themselves, feinting and slicing at the air with scalpels like Don Quixote jousting with windmills but this is my allusion, not Saramago's, but it's one I think he should've made and added a little depth to this scene rather than just severed arteries and screaming, naked nurses running blindly into walls to escape rutting and blind orderlies with tumescent protuberances sprouting from their foreheads and groins (part of the asteroid's spores side-effect of the takeover) and trays of cafeteria food growing cold under the unwatchful eyes of hair-netted custodians in orthopedic footwear. I don't like to say that a Nobel prize-winner should follow my advice, but in this case, he should have.
The alien spores adapt quickly, taking the shape of huggable bunnies (as pictured in blueprint above, patent pending) with sippy cups and drinking straws hidden inside, making them all the more alluring and effective to both adults and children alike and hastening an already extremely efficient alien spore takeover. Well, before you can say glockenspiel or lug nuts, the blindness is so widespread you can't see the trees for the forest, so to speak. Meanwhile, the El Marmotas, immune to the effect of the spores due to some genetic permutation in their mole/bat-infused body chemistry, are having a field day, getting liquored up and aiding in the panic by feeling up blind, unsuspecting women and shoving entire squids up the rectums of the women's accompanying paramours. Not to be forgotten are the group of friends in the tapas bar, feeling their way amongst the deep-fried food debris. Led by Pablo Mercantes, the group consisting of Penelope Pervazas, Renaldo Horchata, Leif Gonzalez and Pasquale Velasquez grope their way out of the tapas bar and through a series of hilarious and slapstick adventures, find themselves in the hospital where they meet up with Dr. Hamantashen's group. Some cannibalism ensues, which is a natural offshoot of human behavior when faced with dire circumstances along with unsightly and frenzied fornication that has more to do with chicken coops than romantic ideals.
He may look like the cock-of-the-walk in his penthouse chicken coop but I don't see any lady chickens around. Do you?All the style in the world won't bring the chickens home to roost if you don't have the personality to match.
A word to the wise here. If you don't enjoy explicit descriptions of cannabalistic gorging you might want to skip pages 137-139. You wouldn't imagine an author of Sarmago's stature could write such depravity and if the Nobel Prize Committee were handing out awards based, say, on a writer's ability to graphically and realistically describe the eating of human intestines, then for this alone Saramago would've won the prize hands down, but of course there are other elements at work, rest and play in this novel. For during a respite from the blind and cannibal orgy, Dr. Hamantashen and Pablo Mercantes strike up an intriguing conversation about the fate of democracy in contemporary Spain, especially after General Franco's reign. Seething anarchists, left-wing tapas-eating amorists and  underground right-wing canoeists all serve as the gunpowder igniting the musket-mouths of these two leaders' verbal firepower and they fire volley after volley at each other while their supporters, sated on human innards, sangria and penicillin, join in the cerebral festivities with raucous shouting and severed appendage waving until one is led to believe blindness is but a small hindrance in their pursuit of merrymaking, rabble rousing and philosophical inquiries. It's true that the political ramblings, considering the circumstances, can feel forced at times, but Saramago is a master at concealing these more dogmatic diversions in his characters' personalities so that, when Penelope Pervazas says to Juan Manchachas, "Hey, bikini waxing is for pleasure-seeking Brazilians and Spanish socialists only," leading Juan to blindly grope Penelope to see, or rather feel which side of the fence she sits on, so as not to split hairs in further conversations and maybe help him get lucky (he being so ugly that finally fate intervenes and ensuing blindness works in his favour), the political and the personal are properly couched in the narrative, seamlessly really, as if the couch were not a couch but a sofa-bed, hidden away but then folding out to reveal so much more than meets the eye in the first place although with all the characters blind, it's not so much what meets the eye as what meets whatever they bump into and they are able to take turns on the sofa-bed, resting a bit before the narrative picks them up and prods them forward again, sometimes like puppets on a string, sometimes like plumbers on call in a land where all the faucets leak.
A small respite for the tortured characters in Saramago's novel as they rest on a sofa-bed before continuing to stumble blindly across the countryside, their philosophical investigations comfortably couched on the double-spring frame, their heavily-stubbed toes wiggling beneath a water-fowl down duvet.
Meanwhile the alien spores shed their bunny sippy cup bodies and take on the glutinous and pulsating contours of their true forms, and then, through a strange and wonderful process, the creatures portrude long suction tubes that they plunge into the humans' eye sockets, sucking out their eyeballs and then replacing them with their own alien eyes. Then everyone is bar-mitzvahed and circumcised to pay them back for the Spanish Inquisition.
Rabbi Mendel Megatron-X-9 performing the simultaneous bar mitzvah/circumcision in accordance with the laws of the 13th tribe of Israel who had been exiled to Gorvotron-6 in the Kishkadian Galaxy back in the 13th century.
And just when you think Saramago couldn't pull any more tricks out of his bag of blindness, Dr. Hamantashen reveals that he is the ringleader of the anarchist group, the El Marmotas, and it was only through the use of invisible liftee-height pads in his shoes that he was able to fool so many of the people for so long and that as a doctor, he had been introducing an El Marmota bat/mole virus via IV-drips into thousands of his patients who are already beginning to show the effects with balding heads, shrinking bodies and an insatiable thirst for liquors of all kinds. Well, what with the alien eye replacements and the bat/mole body reconfigurations, Spain is plunged into sheer anarchy although they still enjoy their siestas and a burgeoning economy due to a heavy export business in chicken drummettes and black velvet toreador pants. The international community enjoys these items so much they turn a blind eye to the alien takeover and the bat/mole people and even the Spanish Inquisition is forgotten in the greasy drippings and sizzlings of miniature chicken legs and thighs. Nobel Prize? Hell yes. Saramago deserves it, if only for the fact Saramago sheds light on a place where no light is normally shed and by that I don't mean your rear end.