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. One such story centres on the village's blind prostitute, whose disability and profession have been passed down from generation to generation as far back as her cursed great-great grandmother. Another follows Jose, a solemn shepherd who feels daunted by the need to confront and vanquish the man villagers say is secretly seeing his wife: the local giant. In lesser hands, such explorations might seem cruel and sadistic, but Peixoto's evocation of pathos is tempered by a keen sense of the absurd and his ironic sensibility shines through beautifully in this new, English translation (by John Gledson), its 12th into another language. Eye-watering depictions of excruciating suffering and violence are interspersed with sardonic observations on fate and sideways glances from the characters at the nature of the universe. The concerns of Peixoto's characters are familiar but their circumstances are fantastic and, above all, they have a lot of time to reflect on their situations. Out of this stew he has crafted an almost charmingly brutal novel whose characters often find profundity in the most abject misery. 'Perhaps suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others,' muses Jose while contemplating the size and strength of his romantic rival. Blank Gaze is sustained by magical characters in a bleak context, each grappling with questions of time and ultimately fate. Their stories are compelling and their meditations on destiny are deep. After all, as Jonathan Swift once observed, who better to acknowledge the power of fate than the miserable? The happy all impute their success to prudence and merit.
