More Moore and Less Saramago
Fernanda Eberstadt‘s 1991 New Yorker piece, “The Palace and the City,” about aristocratic ruins in Sicily, is a sublime piece of reportage. Eberstadt’s just-published New York Times magazine profile of the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago is equally astute about the political currents that swirl around southern Europe. Eberstadt quotes Harold Bloom, who considers Saramago “second only to Philip Roth” among living writers. Myself, I keep trying to make it through Saramago’s 1995 novel, “Blindness,” but its endless paragraphs defeat me.
I am, however, almost certain I’ll like the movie version of that novel that has been filming this summer. Julianne Moore, pictured here, stars. Virtually every character in the movie goes blind; Moore, to play the part of a doctor’s wife, went blonde.
