The novel Cave by Jose Saramago

[Guest guest]

i came across an interesting review of a novel titled The Cave by

Jose Saramago (author of the anti-clergy The Gospel According to

Jesus Christ, which caused such a furor that he exiled himself to

the Spanish Canary Islands). Although the book rants against

corporate greed and corruption it is also a heroic story about

simple human beings who attain dignity in extreme situations,

against forces that would enslave them. (i find it relevant in an

ever-widening gap between North and South, First World and Third

World, between rich and poor.)

 

The landscape is ghastly. It is a toxic, rubbish-strewn urban

wasteland of sooty slums, ecological devastation and roadways

menaced by desperate hijackers and malevolent police. By contrast,

at its core, like some glass-and-steel amoeba, looms the Centre, a

gargantuan and ever-expanding complex of shops, apartments and

offices, its shiny modernity guarded against contamination from the

surrounding squalor by a totalitarian and paranoid security

barricade.

 

Here is a panorama of the Centre, view from an ascending glass

elevator:

 

" It traveled slowly past the different floors, revealing a

succession of arcades, shops, fancy staircases, escalators, meeting

points, cafe, restaurants, terraces with tables and chairs, cinemas

and theaters, discotheques, enormous television screens, endless

numbers of ornaments, electronic games, balloons, fountains and

other water features, platforms, hanging gardens, posters, pennants,

advertising billboards, mannequins, changing rooms, the facade of a

church, the entrance to a beach, a bingo hall, a casino, a tennis

court, a gymnasium, a roller-coaster, a zoo, a racetrack for

electric cars, a cyclorama, a cascade, all waiting, all in silence,

all more shops and more arcades and more mannequins and more hanging

gardens and things for which people probably didn't even know the

names, as if they were ascending into paradise. "

 

jagbir