The Cave (Paperback)

Despite the novel's allegorical structure and didactic message, Saramago creates warm characters who inspire the belief that the good, kind, and sensitive souls of the world can survive, and perhaps triumph on some level. Love and family matter here, despite Cipriano's belief that he is "merely the largest of the bits of clay [in the yard], a small dry clod that will crumble with the slightest pressure." Though he is a molder of clay, he recognizes that there are also forces being exerted on him.

Filled with meditations on literature, reading, the creative process, experimentation, and individuality, the novel is both intellectually exciting and very challenging. Unfortunately, Saramago's style is more daunting than his message. Omitting all quotation marks, question marks, and the conventions of paragraphing and sentence structure, he challenges the reader to distill the reality of his message from the shadows of his style.

Dialogue involving three characters, internal comments on the dialogue by the author, shifts in point of view (even including the dog's view, on occasion), in addition to the on-going developing action, often take place within a single, page-long sentence. Page after page of unbroken, gray type give the reader little "breathing room" and often require rereading, a process reminiscent of Cipriano's working in his pottery and reworking his clay to get it right. Readers considering this book will want to take the time to look up Plato's Allegory of the Cave (many copies of which are available on-line) in order to appreciate its intricacies fully. Mary Whipple

The framework of the sparse story is that The Center cancels their standing order with the potter, forcing him to confront his dying trade. Without any other market to sell to, he and his daughter try to convince The Center to buy ceramic dolls instead. When they agree and order 1,200 dolls, the duo must race to mass produce this new item in their old-fashioned workshop. An additional tension is added by the daughter's husband, who wants them all to move to The Center, where he works as a security guard. Other subplots include the appearance of a stray dog and a local widow's interest in the potter. The story is a something restrained critique of consumerist culture, with sharp digs and jabs here and there, and an overarching reference to Plato's Cave (if you don't know what that is, you'll want to read up on it online), but Saramago seems somewhat more interested in the small family and how they interact. It's a warm portrait of a group of people struggling to keep their heads above water in a mildly dystopian future. Especially endearing are the passages written from the dog's perspective.

The satire of The Center is pretty straightforward, with its control of what gets bought and sold, creepily cheery slogans, and officials who are masters of doublespeak (one line from a buyer goes something like "There is no secret of the bee, but we know what it is."). What is somewhat interesting (as Saramago is well known Communist) is that the same satirical points can (and have) been made against planned economies such as that of the former Soviet Union. The ending is appropriately ambiguous, leaving open the question as to whether or not there is any future in such a world.

It should be noted that the writing style is very distinctive, with little punctuation, no quote marks to delineate speech versus thought, no breaks to indicate who the speaker is, and paragraphs that run for pages and pages. You're either going to love it or hate it in that it'll either make for labored reading or complete immersion reading (our book group split right down the middle on this). Altogether, it's a solid bit of craft, it's not as brilliant as Blindness.