By: Jose Saramago Publisher: Harvest Books Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Harvest Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 352 Publication Date: October 04, 1999
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.
In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.
Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.
And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber
blank white the books suffers from bad translation, questionable grammar, boring details and monotonic characters all strung together with what could have been an effective device: minimal punctuation. It seems the publisher worked very hard to destroy this book. If you like your bleak post apocalyptic literature well written then read Cormac McCarthy.
Amazing allegory that resonates for a long time after the reader is finished with the book. It is one of those stories that allows each reader, religious or non-religious to bring her/his own personal philosophies and beliefs to interpreting the actions of the characters. I hope readers aren't scared off by the extensive violence in the book and focus on the deeper meanings. While I think the writer is absolutely brilliant and all the characters are believable etc... the translation felt a little weak to me. I am looking forward to reading some of his other books.
Blind As A Bat I come to Saramago late. He has obviously been a prolific author, whose great talents brought him to the attention of the Nobel committee. I recently picked this book up, read it quickly, and found it intriguing. No doubt it will make an exciting film. Its basic plot is by now well-known; surely I needn't write another summary.The book is certainly well-written, although it must be said that this is an English translation. No doubt much is lost in word-play, subtlety, and so on. The book is exciting. I didn't find it especially insightful, deep, moving , and even meaningful. It belongs to that genre of fiction that carries a heavy load. It is an allegory, not unlike "Animal Farm " or "Lord of the Flies," which is to say that there is a deliberate lack of psychological insight in favor of sweeping actions that are meant to hint at larger meanings about mankind instead of about individuals. AS the society descends into chaos, we have brilliantly disturbing accounts of human manipulation and violence. The power of the mob comes to the fore and it is chillingly rendered, showing if nothing else what we are really like and really capable of. These sections could have been written by an American at the mid-point of the 20th century given our celebration of these sorts of depictions, especially on film. It's grim picture of mankind. It is hard to believe that any one over 12 would doubt that this is precisely how people behave under duress. What makes this especially deplorable as a picture of human beings is its accuracy; anyone who watched Katrina unfold knows all too well that an incompetent government unwilling or unable to act leaves its people vulnerable to hoodlums, rapists, and killers. Left without water and food, the New Orleans coliseum dwellers more or less lived through what is depicted here by Saramago's all too vivid and accurate imagination. Here Saramago, it seems to me, sees that in the modern age we live in danger not of a Hitlerean take-over, but in danger of total abandonment, where in the face of a real national disaster our government simply turns off the phones and leaves us to fend for ourselves.
fascinating concept I rushed out and bought Blindness after reading the first few pages on Amazon. Well it is definitely a different book... quite confusing, but the chaotic writing style lends itself to the plot. The narrative is so atypical and absorbing-- I flew through the first half of the book, and then it went awry. I think the initial page turning was due to the story's concept and not for the writer's ability. Intermittently I would go from thinking the book was profound and suspenseful to redundant and boring.
Blindness is a good book, but it's not a great one... I would recommend The Road by Cormac McCarthy before this book.
Forces us to look within. What if everyone in the world were to suddenly start losing their sight, and you were the only one to retain it? That, in a nutshell, is the premise of Blindness, a tour de force allegorical novel by the great Portuguese writer Jose Saramago. This is a work that poses very challenging questions for us as humans. How would we accept such a catastrophe? What would we do to survive? To what lengths would we go? How tenuous is the thread that keeps civilization from disintegrating, and how can a human being maintain his or her dignity and humanity under the circumstances?
The people in this novel are unnamed. They could be anyone and everyone. The white blindness that strikes everyone is just a metaphor for any precious human quality that most of us take for granted. The effect on society is similar to that of a natural catastrophe, and has an almost post apocalyptic feel to it. People become subhuman. Some quicker than others. The fact that a group of 7 survives with a semblance of dignity and humanity is due to the fact that they have a sighted one to lead them. At first we marvel at her, but gradually we begin to pity her plight, for she has seen things no one should see, done things no one should have to do, and it's more than any human should have to bear.
Despite the nightmarish circumstances so graphically described, there is a quality of redemption in here. People who were once blind to their true natures despite physically seeing, gradually find that inner illumination in their physical blindness. They lose the world but find their souls. There is a similarity in feeling to the best of Kafka, and to an extent Borges. Saramago takes us on a wild ride, almost to Hell and back, but we disembark wondering more about ourselves than about the characters we encountered.
One thing everyone mentions is the writing style. The lack of punctuation can be disorienting. Saramago capitalizes only when a different character begins to speak. Paragraphs can run for pages at a clip, and he frequently interjects his own (the author's) thoughts in the course of certain sections of dialogue and action. For this reason, many readers will become frustrated, as they start losing their bearings. Perhaps, this was done on purpose, so that the reader may experience in a different sense, the disorientation posed by the circumstances in the novel. Many great books require patience, and due diligence on the part of the reader. The style of Blindness, is one of it's strengths, not a weakness, and a reason why I am not expecting the movie version (which has been made and will be released this year) to be anywhere near as good as it's source.
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