Name: The Stone Raft
ISBN: 9780156004015

José Saramago

Giovanni Pontiero

In a mythic adventure and political fable about the contemporary European community, the Iberian peninsula detaches from the Continent and floats off to sea, becoming home to a group of god-like humans

The Stone Raft

I absolutely love the reflexivity of this novel.

Doug Belshaw

They are seated on the ground, under a Cordoban olive tree, the kind that, according to the popular quatrain, makes the oil yellow, as if olive oil weren't yellow, or only occasionally slightly greenish, and the first words from José Anaiço, he could not suppress them, were, This place is enough to put the fear of God into you, and Pedro Orce replied, It's much worse in Venta Micena, where I was born, an ambiguous formality that means what it appears to be saying as well as the exact opposite, depending more on the reader than on the reading, although the latter is entirely dependent on the former, which explains why we find it so difficult to know who is reading what has been read, or the effect of what has been read on the person who reads it, let us hope that, in this case, Pedro Orce will not think that the curse on the place is the result of his having been born there.

Reaching a decision means saying yes or no, the merest whisper on one's lips, the difficulties come later when one puts that decision into practice, as we learn from human experience, gained with time and patience, with few hopes and even fewer changes. 

One day a rift opens along the border between Spain and France, and the Iberian peninsula floats off across the Atlantic, a great stone raft. But what of the floating population? While the tourists and investors flee, the Spanish and Portuguese escape the coast and wander the inland roads.

This book started really well, with a novel concept and a lightness of touch. However, just like the Iberian peninsula described in the story, it drifted, and ended poorly.

Shreerag Plakazhi

I think this is a book that can benefit from reads and re-reads. It's not often I finish a book and I feel that I have read something truly unique. The Stone Raft is confusing, enlightening, endearing and most definitely unique.

What if, one day, Europe was to crack along the length of the Pyrenees, separating the Iberian peninsula from the rest of Europe? In Saramago's fable, the new island is sent spinning, like a great stone raft, towards the Azores. While the authorities panic and tourists and investors flee, three men, two women and a dog are drawn together by omens that burden them with a peculiar responsibility. The six take to the road, travelling packed into a car, then into a wagon, to explore the limits of their now finite land, adrift in an unfamiliar world and forced to reckon with their relationships, human psychology and the shakiness of belief itself.

The Stone Raft

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