I saw in front of me a girl with a round, rosy face, with blue eyes, with blond hair, who, it appeared all at once, had just entered the service of literature as others decide to enter the service of . . .
In the end and in the beginning it was the beauty and daring of Saramago’s long, elegant sentences, sometimes taking over pages, digressing in observations of his narrator or denials or second thought, elongating into treatises on will and speculation, . . .