The Cave [Hardcover]

Jose Saramago (Author), Margaret Costa (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2002

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, apartment blocks, offices, and sensation zones. Marçal works there as a security guard, and Cipriano drives him to work each day before delivering his own humble pots and jugs. On one such visit, he is told not to make any more deliveries until further notice. People prefer plastic, he is told; it lasts longer and doesn't break.
Unwilling to give up his craft, Cipriano tries his hand at making ceramic dolls. Astonishingly, The Center places an order for hundreds of figurines, and Cipriano and Marta set to work. In the meantime, Cipriano meets a young widow at the graves of their recently departed spouses, and a hesitant romance begins.
When Marta learns that she is pregnant and Marçal receives a promotion, they all move into an apartment in The Center. Soon they hear a mysterious sound of digging, and one night Marçal and Cipriano investigate. Horrified by the discovery, the family, which now includes the widow and a dog, sets off in a truck, heading for the great unknown.
Suffused with the depth, humor, and above all the extraordinary sense of humanity that marks each of his novels, The Cave is sure to become an essential book of our time.

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1ST edition (November 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151004145
• ISBN-13: 978-0151004140
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #867,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

JOSE SARAMAGO is one of the most acclaimed writers in the world today. He is the author of numerous novels, including All the Names, Blindness, and The Cave. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A retelling of Platos Allegory of the Cave and a warning., November 8, 2002

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Cave (Hardcover)

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

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Books Worth Reading Again and Again, February 17, 2003

By 

Timothy Haugh (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Cave (Hardcover)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Spelunking, December 19, 2007

By 

John Petralia (Loveladies, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Cave (Paperback)

This one is different. First, there's the writing style. Forget punctuation. Forget paragraphs. Forget chapter headings. Saramago's prose comes at you like packets of bits and bytes down a fiber pipe. Think Rushdie on steroids. Next, there's Algor Cipriano, the potter. Our introduction to him begins with Algor's ramblings; some are spoken; others are not. His thoughts mold our view of Algor. He is 64, widowed, with a married daughter. He is independent, hard working, loyal and noble. He is a man you can like. But, Algor's worker peasant ways are the old ways. More and more people are moving to high rises in the New Town. The swank population there prefers mass produced items over hand-made pottery. Algor is rapidly becoming obsolete, useless, old. He has two choices: retire to the New Town where he can live in a tiny apartment with his daughter and son-in-law or re-mold himself into something more marketable. His struggle is profoundly moving. He knows that he must change, keep up with modern times, but wait. Wait. As he gets a closer look at the new town Center, he is convinced that the new way is false. It's a trap. Why would anyone want to live in a high-rise cubit---a cave---even if it does have 500 cable channels, a slick Micro-wave oven, simulated rain forest, and an indoor ski jump? The new town residents, in Algor's estimation, are not seeing reality. They are dupes, consumed by consumerism. The Cave is not a pretty tale, but it is one where you'll enjoy the spelunking.