[Dragaera] Jose Saramago, Paarfi

[Philip Hart]

I've been noting examples of intrusive narrators and the use of 
continued narrative time during digressions.  There's a nice one in
_The Gospel According to Jesus Christ_: on pg 161 of the ppb Pontiero 
translation, Jesus is travelling to Jerusalem as a young man; he is 
robbed by two thieves; he perhaps has profound thoughts afterwards; 
and the narrator preemptively defends the possibility of such things 
in the mind of a thirteen-year-old son of a carpenter two thousand 
years ago, referring to Lacan and Cro-Magnon man in the process. 
Then he says, "Distracted by these reflections, which are not entirely 
irrelevant to the gospel we have been telling, we forgot, to our shame, 
to accompany Joseph's son on the last leg of his journey to Jerusalem, 
where he is just now arriving, penniless but safe."

The novel, incidentally, is well worth reading, full of beautiful 
thoughts, if on occasion unsubtle or unremittingly savage and even 
(so it appeared on first reading anyway) just random.  Also deeply sad 
but at times very funny and once or twice hopeful despite the subject 
matter and worldview.