Ricardo Reis, Backgammon, Terragen

I finished José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis a few days ago. I found it a deliciously rich and heady book, of the kind best read slowly, for fear that a kind of literary indigestion may otherwise result. I had only previously read a single short work by Saramago, The Tale of the Unknown Island, to which I was drawn by the conjunction of the renowned author's name with that of Peter Sís, as illustrator. As it turned out, neither the tale nor its few illustrations sufficed to make a worthwhile stand-alone publication: it was just too slender a thing. Then, in the James Thin bookshop in Edinburgh last November I decided to give Saramago a second chance. There isn't much of a plot, Dr. Reis returns to Lisbon after years of exile in Brazil. He stays at an hotel for a while, during which time he becomes involved with two very different women. He converses at length with the ghost of his friend, Fernando Pessoa. He gets a locum job and moves out into an apartment. He has an unnerving brush with the state police. Despite the apparent lack of narrative propulsion, Saramago's prose is so exquisitely fine that one barely notices it. I shall certainly be reading more of his work, though I'll take the time to digest this one first. One sad observation provoked by the book is how far the quality of Harvill paperbacks has declined over the past ten years or so. The Saramago book is a shoddy thing when compared to early '90s editions. I suppose the years of being sucked in and spat back out by the big multinational publishing companies has left its inevitable mark.

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When my wife and I bought a backgammon set, in luxurious tan pleather and psuede, last week, I struggled to remember the single set of circumstances under which I had played the game before.

I think it must have been my old friend Dr. M________ who tried to teach me to play, but whether this was during the Wimbledon or the Edinburgh years, I could not recall. In any case my wife and I played it for the first time on Saturday evening. We both had to re-learn the rules from scratch. We both found it an enjoyable game, though I am unlikely to master it. For a supposedly intelligent person, I have an alarming inaptitude for games of strategy and skill. Dr. M________ could beat me every time, just as he would at chess. Even my cellphone, I have recently discovered, can beat me at reversi more often than not. Reversi, I digress, was the first game I learned to play on a computer, specifically on our school's Research Machines 380Z, a hefty black CP/M box of ca. 1986 vintage. After a few weeks' play I found I could outsmart the program every time. My ability has lagged far behind the intervening years' advances in technology, and I can only just about beat the program on my Siemens SL45 phone when it's set to a medium difficulty level.

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The other week, after reading a boingboing spot, I downloaded the Terragen landscape-design and rendering software. It's fun to play around with. Here is my best imaginary landscape shot to come out of the hour or so of playing around with it.

Click on the image to see the full-sized original.

Posted by misteraitch at February 2, 2003 06:07 PM | TrackBack