[KevinDonae]

I remembered that when I read this novel, I thought this couldn't have been written by Saramago, It's so different from all his works, I couldn't understand it very well. It was a long time ago since I read it, but I have to say that whenever I re-read I'll have to get a different approach, to dive into the novel without thinking it's a Saramago, because you can get lost easily.

Said that, I think that in this book we still see a Saramago trying to find his true soul as a novelist. As you said, the novel is in first person, a characteristic he will not return in his later novels; again, he stills uses punctuation. If I'm not wrong, his next novel is Levantado do Ch?o, and in this one we can see the process completing more and more, although he still uses punctuation here. I think his transformation completes totally in Memorial do Convento, his first masterpiece and the first novel where we see Saramago as we know him right now.