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I"ll admit it. I did not love Jose Saramago’s All the Names. For me it seemed to meander, too often a bit pointlessly or at least at greater length than seemed necessary to me. Personal opinion. Others I know whose tastes I respect found it breathtaking. And there were indeed certain sensational sentences I copied whole into the little notebook I keep for saving and savoring words and bits of writing. But it irritated me at times. Not so The Cave. This story structure I understood. The parable. The folk tale replete with the symbolism of Plato’s cave. A story about peasants wrestling with a world that is changing in ways that seemed too sterile, too impersonal. A world where there are shadows on the wall and a confusion between what is real and what only appears to be real. I sunk down into the reading of it like someone dropping into a feather bed. I’m not saying it was an easy read. I’m saying that it was comforting in the way it called me into a cave of sorts – another time, another place, with people whose traditions seemed solid and meaningful. And yet – who knew there was no way to “hold the river in their hands.” In the opening pages Cipriano Algor, the patriarch of the family and Marçal Gacho, his son-in-law are on their way to the city where Marcal works as a security guard in The Center - a self-contained residential community that includes shops and movie theaters and amusements. Marçal may soon be promoted which will require that he move with Cipriano’s daughter to live there. The tension between them is this. Cipriano’s daughter wants him to join them if they move to The Center because her mother has died not long ago and Cipriano would be alone. But Cipriano does not want to leave the land or the work his family has done for generations – making pottery. A simple story line that grows more complex as Cipriano is told at The Center that his pottery is obsolete, plastic is the new choice of modern women. His daughter, seeing his devastation cannot help herself. She suggests – though she knows she would be better to encourage her father to retire – that perhaps The Center might be interested in ceramic dolls. And so they plunge, the two of them, into the creative endeavor of seeking prototypes from ancient books, choosing color, fashioning figures. The creative act beckons them as it had their ancestors. It is this section that stays with me even now – the two of them, their heads bowed over ancient books, seeking an idea, bringing skill and experience and the artistic impulse to the creative act. But there is more. There is the mystery of what lies beneath the foundations of The Center and the deeply satisfying way this novel ends. <back to list |
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