Blank Gaze
by Jose Luis Peixoto
Bloomsbury, HK$264
Surrounded by the undulating plains and unrelenting cicadas of the Alentejo, Jose the shepherd is casting his gaze about and mulling over the rumour that the devil himself had whispered in his ear about his wife's infidelity.
This exchange took place at Judas' General Store, the local meeting spot in Jose Peixoto's tiny imaginary Portuguese village; where you'll also find Gabriel, the 150-year-old man, the local giant Rafael, a peg-legged carpenter, and Moises and Elias, Siamese twins joined at their fingertips.
Winner of the 2001 Jose Saramago Prize - Portugal's answer to the Booker Prize - Blank Gaze is a story about rural poverty that blurs the distinction between the real and the fantastic across two generations. Loosely threaded together from the varying perspectives of the residents of a featureless, sparsely populated town left behind by modernity, no overarching history or narrative is drawn here. Blank Gaze is more an eclectic collection of vignettes that reveal the fates, attitudes and interactions of its characters than a plot-driven novel in any meaningful sense. These are brilliantly rendered episodic tales of rural loss, suffering and torture on a fantastic scale in a village that in other respects is as banal as any typical country setting.