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''The Lives of Things'' is a short story collection by Portuguese novelist and Nobel-prize winner Jose Saramago. It was originally published in 1978 in Portuguese under the title ''Objecto Quase''. This article refers to the English translation by Giovanni Pontiero, published by Verso in 2012. == Plot == Several of the stories foreground an inanimate object which is pivotal in historical events or human consciousness. "Chair" is about a mahogany chair which is slowly rotted from within by several generations of anobium though the rot is invisible from the outside. As a consequence of this rot, the chair collapses underneath an unnamed dictator who is identified as former Portuguese Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar by the book's translator.〔Pontiero, Giovanni. Forward. The Lives of Things. London: Verso, 2012.〕 In "Reflux," an unnamed king has such a fear of death that he cannot bear the sight of a funeral procession, grave stones, or black mourning clothes. So he commissions the building of a giant cemetery with high walls in the center of the unnamed country of which he is leader. The cemetery requires major re-engineering and excavation of much of the country's infrastructure. But it does succeed for some years in shielding the king from any visible reminders of death. So many service industries spring up around the cemetery that it effectively becomes a major city. Eventually, though, a cypress tree, which is a symbol of death in some cultures, becomes visible over the wall, and the king realizes that he cannot ultimately defeat death. In "Things," the objects on which humans rely start rebelling against their exploitation. It starts with a sofa that gets too warm to sit in and proceeds to the disappearance of whole apartment buildings and the deaths of their inhabitants. Humans decide to fight back with an attack on part of the city. Many city dwellers gather together in the countryside to watch the attack. When the attack is imminent, however, the entire city simply disappears. So do all the clothes of the assembled citizens, leaving them without any of the trappings of civilization. It turns out that there is a community of people who have been living in the woods without the benefit of technology or manufacture. At the end of the story, these people comment that never again will people be treated as things. In "Embargo," an unidentified man finds that he is trapped in his car for no apparent reason. It appears that the car has found a will of its own and refuses to let him leave. The car refuses to go where the man intends to drive. Instead, it keeps getting in line at gas stations even though the tank is nearly full. This takes place during a gas crisis, so the lines are quite long. In the end, the man dies and only then slides out of his car. "The Centaur" imagines the last of the half-man, half-horse men wandering through the woods avoiding human developments through the centuries. Throughout much of the story, the man part of the centaur experiences life separately from the horse part. For instance, the horse falls asleep while the man is still awake. At the end of the story, the beast/man can no longer endure his loneliness and abducts a woman, though not with any intention to assault her. This draws attention to him for the first time in centuries. A group of men hunts down and surrounds him with nets and weapons. In an attempt to escape, the centaur loses his footing on a steep hill and falls onto a jagged rock which impales him. At the end of the story, he apprehends his own death. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Lives of Things」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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