Product Description

Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his daughter Marta and her husband Marçal in a small village on the outskirts of The Center, an imposing complex of shops, apartments, and offices to which Cipriano delivers his pots and jugs every month. On one such trip, he is told not to make any more deliveries. Unwilling to give up his craft, Cipriano tries his hand at making ceramic dolls. Astonishingly, The Center places an order for hundreds, and Cipriano and Marta set to work-until the order is cancelled and the three have to move from the village into The Center. When mysterious sounds of digging emerge from beneath their apartment, Cipriano and Marçal investigate, and what they find transforms the family's life. Filled with the depth, humor, and the extraordinary philosophical richness that marks each of Saramago's novels, The Cave is one of the essential books of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124186 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780156028790
• Condition: USED - LIKE NEW
• Notes:
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Amazon.com Review
José Saramago is a master at pacing. Readers unfamiliar with the work of this Portuguese Nobel Prize winner would do well to begin with The Cave, a novel of ideas, shaded with suspense. Spare and pensive, The Cave follows the fortunes of an aging potter, Cipriano Algor, beginning with his weekly delivery of plates to the Center, a high-walled, windowless shopping complex, residential community, and nerve center that dominates the region. What sells at the Center will sell everywhere else, and what the Center rejects can barely be given away in the surrounding towns and villages. The news for Cipriano that morning isn't good. Half of his regular pottery shipment is rejected, and he is told that the consumers now prefer plastic tableware. Over the next week, he and his grown daughter Marta grieve for their lost craft, but they gradually open their eyes to the strange bounty of their new condition: a stray dog adopts them, and a lovely widow enters Cipriano's life. When they are invited to live at the Center, it seems ungracious to refuse, but there are strange developments under the complex and a troubling increase in security, and Cipriano changes all their fates by deciding to investigate. In Saramago's able hands, what might have become a dry social allegory is a delicately elaborated story of individualism and unexpected love. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
The struggle of the individual against bureaucracy and anonymity is one of the great subjects of modern literature, and Saramago is often matched with Kafka as one of its premier exponents. Apt as the comparison is, it doesn't convey the warmth and rueful human dimension of novels like Blindness and All the Names. Those qualities are particularly evident in his latest brilliant, dark allegory, which links the encroaching sterility of modern life to the parable of Plato's cave. Widowed Cipriano Algor is a 64-year-old Portuguese potter who finds his business collapsing when the demand dries up for his elegant, handcrafted wares. His potential fate seems worse than poverty-to move with his daughter, Marta, and his son-in-law, Mar‡al Gacho, into a huge, arid complex known as "The Center," where Gacho works as a security guard. But Algor gets an order from the Center for hundreds of small ceramic figurines, a task that has Marta and Algor hustling to meet the delivery date. Saramago's flowing, luminous prose (beautifully translated by Costa) serves him well in the early going as he portrays the intricacies of Algor's artistic life and the beginning of his friendship with a widow he meets at the cemetery. The middle chapters bog down as the author lingers over the process of creating the dolls and the family's ongoing debate over Algor's future. But Saramago makes up for the brief slow stretch with a stunning ending after the doll project crashes, when Algor becomes a resident of the Center and finds a shocking surprise in a cave unearthed beneath it. The characters are as finely crafted as Algor's pottery, and Saramago deserves special kudos for his one-dog canine chorus, a stray mutt named Found that Algor adopts as his emotional sounding board. Saramago has an extraordinary ability to make a complex narrative read like a simple parable. This remarkably generous and eloquent novel is another landmark work from an 80-year-old literary giant who remains at the height of his powers.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In another of Saramago's haunting fables, an elderly potter has turned to making dolls for sale at the Center, a huge complex of shops near his village. But a chance discovery at the Center sends him and his family fleeing in terror.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A retelling of Plato�s Allegory of the Cave and a warning.
In this metaphysical and surrealistic novel, Saramago transforms Plato's Allegory of the Cave into a contemporary novel about Cipriano Algor, a man in his sixties who lives in a small village, where he practices his trade as a potter. Living in tune with nature as he digs clay from the earth, works it with his hands, and fires it in an old, family-owned kiln, Cipriano suddenly finds himself without a livelihood when a mysterious and all-powerful Center rejects his real pottery in favor of longer-lasting plastic. And when Cipriano's real life in his small village is also sacrificed for a totally controlled life in an apartment in the Center, Saramago vividly illustrates how the shadows of artificial things are often mistaken for reality in contemporary society, which does not favor "inquisitive ones," searching for life's essence.

Despite the novel's allegorical structure and didactic message, Saramago creates warm characters who inspire the belief that the good, kind, and sensitive souls of the world can survive, and perhaps triumph on some level. Love and family matter here, despite Cipriano's belief that he is "merely the largest of the bits of clay [in the yard], a small dry clod that will crumble with the slightest pressure." Though he is a molder of clay, he recognizes that there are also forces being exerted on him.

Filled with meditations on literature, reading, the creative process, experimentation, and individuality, the novel is both intellectually exciting and very challenging. Unfortunately, Saramago's style is more daunting than his message. Omitting all quotation marks, question marks, and the conventions of paragraphing and sentence structure, he challenges the reader to distill the reality of his message from the shadows of his style.

Dialogue involving three characters, internal comments on the dialogue by the author, shifts in point of view (even including the dog's view, on occasion), in addition to the on-going developing action, often take place within a single, page-long sentence. Page after page of unbroken, gray type give the reader little "breathing room" and often require rereading, a process reminiscent of Cipriano's working in his pottery and reworking his clay to get it right. Readers considering this book will want to take the time to look up Plato's Allegory of the Cave (many copies of which are available on-line) in order to appreciate its intricacies fully. Mary Whipple

Books Worth Reading Again and Again
Jose Saramago is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. I consider his novel Blindness to be one of the best novels I've read in the past five years. The Cave only continues the growth of my respect for him.

I often find when I read one of Saramago's novels that I am reminded of other authors I enjoy. Blindness reminds me of The Plague by Camus and The Cave reminds me of The Castle by Kafka. I don't know if this is Saramago's intention. Perhaps I am reading too much into things. But Saramago is not writing lesser version of old stories. He always has a unique take and, if anything, his stories are more accessible.

In The Cave there are two key locations--the village where the main character, Cipriano Algor, works in his traditional pottery, and The Center. The Center is an ultra-modern complex of living and shopping whose residents never need to leave. Even though most of the action takes place at the village, it is The Center that is the focus of the majority of attention. It dominates the landscape both literally and figuratively. Cipriano sells his wares there and has no control over if and what the bureaucrats of The Center will buy. When his dishes are no longer wanted, he tries to sell ceramic dolls. When these are not a success, he moves to The Center with his daughter and son-in-law but, after an eerie discovery, they leave The Center forever.

And yet, Saramago is not creating an allegory of traditional vs. modern. He is telling the story of people. In his unique style of long paragraphs with little punctuation, he creates a number of very vivid characters--not only Cipriano but also his daughter, Marta; son-in-law, Marcal; and the widow, Isaura. Even the dog, Found, is a brilliant creation with a will of his own.

Admittedly, I don't believe I have plumbed the depths of this novel. The meaning of the discovery at The Center that inspires them to run away is a bit of a mystery to me. But I like a story that leaves me something to chew on. This is a novel I will come back to and read again. Saramago is that rare author who writes books worth re-reading.

Life experience packaged and sold back to us
The story starts out in a simple fashion, Cipriano Algor, a widower in his sixties and a potter by trade, is on the verge of losing his livelihood. He lives with his daughter, Marta, and his son-in-law, Marcal, who is a security guard at the Centre, a huge complex in the city where people live, work, and most importantly shop and consume without ever having to go outside. For quite awhile the Centre had been Cipriano's only buyer of his earthenware crafts, their contract with him demanding that he sell to the Centre exclusively, and then one day his contract is abruptly cancelled. At the same time, his son-in-law is expecting a promotion to resident guard which would involve leaving the pottery and moving the family into the Centre, but even so Cipriano and Marta make a last attempt to save the pottery from extinction. More than just a story about aging, or traditional ways versus modern life, the suspense builds throughout this short novel as the reader is drawn into the lives and feelings of very realistic human beings..

The close to nature life of the village and the globalized Centre are in total contrast and the drive from the village to the Centre is unforgettable, first passing the so-called green belt where nothing is green (and the insides of the strawberries grown there are white), then through the industrial belt, then the shanty town where the poor live, then through the city itself to the impenetrable fortress called the Centre. Consumers are barraged with advertising slogans and expect to find everything (or a copy of everything) that can be bought from anywhere in the world as well as every imaginable form of entertainment including a casino, a racing track for cars, a beach with waves - even sensations, like being in a tornado, or a blizzard can be experienced inside the Centre. Most of the apartments in the Centre do not even have windows that look out, many of the residents prefer a view of the inside of the Centre itself, and half the dwellings have no windows at all.

I had never before heard of Plato's story of the cave, but I have learned about it since finishing this novel and once seen the connection is striking, just the way the people in the cave are able to see only shadows on the wall which they mistake for reality, so the people in the center see and experience only artificial life, all in all quite a comment on global capitalism. This was my fourth book by Jose Saramago and once again I am struck by his slow and subtle but very powerful style as a writer.