I never liked love stories
The predictability of most of them bored me enormously. The cliché filled chapters were, at its core, identical to the chapters of every other love story. Even the titles seemed to be all picked from the same bag.
The worst of all, though, were the characters. They were nowhere near someone I identified with, not even remotely. I couldn't feel connected to them. What they were experiencing were not, for the majority, situations that could have happened in real life. When I was a teenager, I used to feel so detached from the characters in love stories that I consider the hypothesis that there was something wrong with me.
José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, therefore, being born in Portugal, I had to study his works at high school. Baltasar and Blimunda was a mandatory book and, as it was customary with high school students and mandatory books, wrapped negatively ("too long", "too hard to read", "He has never heard of punctuation"). I admit it took me a while to get the hang of how to read his books. I had to read it out loud as if I was telling a story instead of reading a story. By telling the story I then learnt how to read his books - imagining he is with me telling me a story.
Baltasar and Blimunda is a story about a king and a queen that couldn't conceive. It's about the construction of the Palace/Convent of Mafra. Baltasar and Blimunda is, above all, a love story. A love story with characters you can identify with. A love story with enough reality to make you believe it could very well have happened.
And so are all of his books.
The worst of all, though, were the characters. They were nowhere near someone I identified with, not even remotely. I couldn't feel connected to them. What they were experiencing were not, for the majority, situations that could have happened in real life. When I was a teenager, I used to feel so detached from the characters in love stories that I consider the hypothesis that there was something wrong with me.
José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, therefore, being born in Portugal, I had to study his works at high school. Baltasar and Blimunda was a mandatory book and, as it was customary with high school students and mandatory books, wrapped negatively ("too long", "too hard to read", "He has never heard of punctuation"). I admit it took me a while to get the hang of how to read his books. I had to read it out loud as if I was telling a story instead of reading a story. By telling the story I then learnt how to read his books - imagining he is with me telling me a story.
Baltasar and Blimunda is a story about a king and a queen that couldn't conceive. It's about the construction of the Palace/Convent of Mafra. Baltasar and Blimunda is, above all, a love story. A love story with characters you can identify with. A love story with enough reality to make you believe it could very well have happened.
And so are all of his books.
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