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1.Death with Interruptions by: Jose Saramago October 06, 2008
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $24.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $16.32 You Save: $7.68 (32%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $40.79
"The following day, no one died." Thus begins Jose Saramago's latest masterpiece, a quirky, whimsical, and utterly enthralling tale called DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS. Written in Saramago's characteristic style - dense, run-on sentences filled with multiple digressive asides and dialog unseparated by line breaks or quotation marks - the book stands as an offbeat meditation on death and the manner in which humanity copes (or fails to cope) with it. DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS consists of two loosely linked segments, the latter ultimately looping back to form a perfect circle with the former. In the first half of the book, death is an impersonal presence, noticeable only for its absence within the geographic borders of an unspecified country. Saramago here recalls the premise of the 1934 ... Read More

2.Seeing by: Jose Saramago April 10, 2006
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: $8.60
I guess I was looking for a sequel to Blindness and this book is defintely not a sequel to Blindness. Book could have been good, but after reading first 40 - 50 pages, I could not bring myself to devoting more time to finish this book.

3.All the Names by: Jose Saramago September 02, 1999
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: $23.36
I guess I was looking for a sequel to Blindness and this book is defintely not a sequel to Blindness. Book could have been good, but after reading first 40 - 50 pages, I could not bring myself to devoting more time to finish this book.

4.The Flanders Panel by: Arturo Perez-Reverte June 07, 2004
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $14.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $0.01
"The Flanders Panel" was the first Perez-Reverte book I read, and as soon as I finished it, I was ready for more! I found the setting of the story to be very believable as far as the art restoration and museum milieu. I liked the main character, Julia, and I was fascinated by the mystery inside a mystery of the painting. The writing is very atmospheric, you can almost feel and smell things as they are described. I'm not a chess player, so the details of the game that are part of the mystery were lost on me, but I didn't feel as though I was missing the story because of it. After a lot of suspense is built, the conclusion is somewhat disappointing, the motive is weak, but I liked the story anyway.

5.The Cave by: Jose Saramago October 03, 2002
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: $49.74
As sixty-year-old Cipriano Algor's days as a potter come to an abrupt end due to economic pressure, he, his daughter Marta and son-in-law Marçal, struggle to redefine their lives and build a direction for their futures. The conflict between Capriano's life as a potter with direct ties to nature, versus the looming prospect of life at the Center, an amoral, controlled world of meaningless experience and entertainment, is at the heart of this complex and beautiful novel. _The Cave_ is stylistically similar to Saramago's other works -- creative punctuation, meandering paragraphs, sudden breaks in dialogue -- that can be challenging for readers pampered by bestselling American authors, but the beauty and depth of his prose are worthy rewards. His sentences flow like rivers of ideas, and any dedicated reader ... Read More

6.The Double by: Jose Saramago October 03, 2005
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $14.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $0.88
If you hate paragraph breaks this book's for you! Hardly any paragraphs and no quotation marks makes us think more deeply about who is talking ie identity. Part philosophy/part thriller, I enjoyed reading this book and loved the ending, but felt left behind a bit in the middle, and my life wasn't changed at the end like I'd hoped. I didn't think Tertuliano got as much out of it either ... shouldn't he have been more moved also? Ie in a good, life-affirming way? Maybe I was picturing a different kind of book ... this one's double? 3 1/2 stars

7.A Heart So White by: Javier Marias 1996-02
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: $1.78
Quite possibly the worst book I have ever read. I reached page 204 and can move no further, for if I come across one more simile, I might blow my freakin' brain out of my cabeza, or jump off of a really high object. Alas, the one positive note is that this book inspired me to fall into the work of an artist whom I love: Georges Bataille. Let me say this too: I don't read much contemporary literature; I was told that this was a great work of contemporary literature; I'll stick to a nostalgia for the works that were written when writers could actually write--thank you very much. I was truly floored by the emptiness of this piece; funny how a book can waste one's time.

8.The Book of Disquiet (Extraordinary Classics) by: Fernando Pessoa 1992-03
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: $4.93
The life - project of Pessoa in his making of multiple poetic alter egos, reminds of the life - project of Kierkegaard who explored various aspects of the religious life through use of alter egos often representing different faculties, approaches and moods of life. But if Kierkegaard's aim is to bring the reader to realization of what it might be to be in true connection with God, Pessoa's seems to be more to dissipate the notion of unique identity completely out of existence. Thus the fragments he shores around his own ruin and attributes to alter ego , heteronym Bernard Soares have within them a strong nihilistic self- and - world denying element. Yet and here is the contradiction and the deeper truth they also reveal a kind of beauty both in perception and in the varied motion of the mental life itself. Lonely solitary lost fragmented ... Read More

9.Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me by: Javier Marias 2001-10
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $15.95 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $10.85 You Save: $5.10 (32%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $3.11
TOMORROW IN THE BATTLE THINK ON ME is among the best contemporary fiction I have read. TOMORROW begins with the narrator (whose full name is not revealed until p. 232) in the midst of the preliminaries of sex with a married woman, who apparently is casting about for an affair, whose husband is in London and whose two-year-old son in a room down the hall, when the woman suddenly feels ill and shortly thereafter, half-naked, dies in the arms of the narrator. The rest of the book is taken up with the narrator trying to find out more about the dead woman and her husband and family, as well as slowly revealing to the woman's sister and husband what happened that night. (There also are three diversions or side-plots: a meeting with the King of Spain, a flashback to a bizarre evening the narrator had with a prostitute and his estranged wife more than two ... Read More

10.The Tale of the Unknown Island by: Jose Saramago October 05, 2000
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $10.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $8.00 You Save: $2.00 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $3.89
This beautiful little fable has been compared to Antoine de Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince." It can easily be read in one short sitting, but skip the jacket blurb, which detracts from the impact of the book itself. A man goes to the door of petitions to ask the king for a boat so that he can find the unknown island. The king is busy waiting at the door of favors for boons from his subjects, so the door of petitions is finally answered by the cleaning woman. When the persistent petitioner finally receives his boat from the king, his destiny becomes linked with that of the cleaning woman. The peculiar punctuation of this book makes the reader search within for meaning and adds to the book's poetry, depth, and wisdom. If you've already read this book and want more in this vein, try Snow : A Novel.

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