Skylight

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Skylight Books Details

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (December 2, 2014)
Language: English

ISBN-10: 0544090020
ISBN-13: 978-0544090026
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches

Anyone who has ever lived in an apartment building is familiar with the unique intimacy that such dwellings unintentionally provide. You may never see your upstairs neighbor, but you know that he wakes up at 6am sharp, grinds his coffee beans, and has a parrot that knows how to say a few choice curse words. Sometimes you know far more stories pieced together by casual encounters in common areas, or bits of conversations overheard through too-thin walls. In the previously unpublished novel, Skylight, the late, great José Saramago gives us unfettered access to the lives of several tenants in a Lisbon apartment building in 1940—lives that intersect and sometimes clash in shocking ways. Saramago’s gift for penning well-drawn female characters is on full display here, as is his mastery of illuminating the extraordinary in the mundane. But Skylight is also a very philosophical novel in Saramago’s signature style, one in which the characters wrestle with profound questions, questions the reader will grapple with long after the last page is turned. Read online Skylight book now.

Skylight Books Review

Skylight is a kind of mosaic novel about the working-class people who live in a tenement. The entire novel takes place within the building. All the families and individuals have their own stories, which are grim due to their socioeconomic status. Lidia, the kept mistress of a wealthy man, watches him becoming attracted to her beautiful, younger neighbor. Caetano and Justina are unhappily married—he’s a womanizer and she’s still mourning their daughter who died two years earlier. Emilio and Carmen are another unhappy, continually quarreling couple. The sisters Isaura and Adriana, who live with their mother and aunt, are confused about their sexual desires. Silvestre and Mariana are happily married until (to add to their slender income), they rent space to Abel, a young existentialist who refuses to commit himself to anything and reads Dostoyevsky. Although Skylight was initially rejected for publication and Saramago withheld it from publication during his lifetime, it’s well written and the translation flows smoothly. But it’s not a cheerful book. Get online Skylight today.