Parei na página 60, porque não consegui ler mais.A escrita é muito similar à de José Saramago, da qual não sou propriamente fã. Mas lá me habituei à maneira do autor escrever, ainda que me irritasse bastante. O maior problema não foi esse, o que me fez bufar de aborrecimento foi mesmo a história. Não me diz nada, é entediante. E não gostei de uma parte em que a palavra "couve", se não estou em erro, é repetida milhares de vezes ao longo de um parágrafo. É irritante!Não é o estilo de livro de que goste. Talvez outros gostem. A piece that got bumped from the Literary Review for lack of space:From the Mount of Olives farm, absentee landlords dominate local finances. In their abandoned mansion a voice rambles from within a trunk, speaking aphorisms that recur in the minds of locals. In town, meanwhile, the devil trades hurtful gossip with villagers who drink at Judas’ general store. Donning a chasuble, he performs weddings at the local church, dooming the unions at which he presides.José is a shepherd on the Mount of Olives estate, regularly beaten by a nameless giant who sleeps with José’s wife. The devil urges José to catch her in this infidelity and then commit suicide. Siamese twins Moisés and Elias, joined at the last knuckle of one finger but refusing separation, marry a cook who expresses herself through sculpted food. A contracting collard-green vagina for dinner hints at barrenness, but they nevertheless conceive. When the twins eat a fatally poisonous valentine, the cook goes mad. One-eyed, one-armed, one-legged carpenter Rafael marries a blind prostitute; when she dies delivering a stillborn child, Rafael saws off his remaining leg and sets himself on fire. Life is strange and shocking in this little Portuguese town, and yet as a chronicle of that life, Blank Gaze is strangely devoid of tension, momentum, or evolution: in their place are detachment, and the arbitrariness of coincidence. This is not unintentional: here is a static place, where “for thirty years the same men would come on the same days to buy the same quantities of cork, the same amounts of wheat and olives, paying the same price as in previous years”. Style echoes the theme of changelessness, for although it often veers from third person to first and from character to character, the narrative nevertheless remains deeply impersonal. The voices are barely differentiated, and as a result seem intractably that of the author.Formerly a poet, José Luís Peixoto has a great capacity for making phrases, but will regularly over-indulge, with awkward results. What does it mean, for example, to say that “men are sheep that don’t sleep”? The voice in the trunk bears an unfortunate resemblance to Kahlil Gibran, and Blank Gaze quickly accumulates vacant platitudes and flimsy truisms – so quickly that we cannot help but wonder if they are purposefully empty. Peixoto offers many clues to his intentions – in fact, Blank Gaze seems sometimes to consist of little else, delivered with hammer-like subtlety – and yet they prove impossible to follow. The carpenters and shepherds of Mount of Olives have biblical names, but all the women are nameless; children inherit acquired traits (such as bruises) from their parents, implying an emblematic rather than genetic legacy. We meet a disembodied voice and a devil. Temporal things are called eternal.It remains difficult to know what all this means. Symbolism normally highlights the themes arising from a novel’s characters and situations, but in Blank Gaze, every character and each situation is treated as symbolic, and the purpose of the exercise becomes impossible to judge. Is this an allegory – and if so, of what? Is it a meta-fiction intended to disclose the mechanical God of literary symbolism? Storytelling as exegesis? Perhaps it is none of these. The instinct to plumb for depth even where none is apparent is a commendable one when dealing with the atypical in art, but when Blank Gaze ends without resolution, readers will be forgiven if they turn the question on its head, to ask: has the author demanded more of me than I am accustomed to give, or required too little of himself?
What do You think about Nenhum Olhar (2010)?
This book reads like a beautiful poem, but the story is such a downer.
—ica
currently paused...beautifully written...but extremely dense.
—lianne
o meu favorito do José Luis Peixoto...
—lrodendaal
