User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
This book left me speechless (which is a rare occurrence). Please enjoy the pictures to illustrate the plot while I recover my gift of rambling.
An unexplained plague of "white blindness" sweeps the unnamed country. Initial attempts to hastily quarantine the blind in an abandoned mental hospital fail to contain the spread. What they succeed at is immediately creating the easy "us versus them" divide between the helpless newly blind and the terrified seeing.
Before we know, we are immersed in the horrifying surreal world of hopelessness, filth, violence, and hate, where the true enemy is not their affliction but people themselves, which we can see through the eyes of the only person who appears immune to blindness.
“Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.”
As the blindness epidemic spreads, we see the disintegration of society just like we witnessed the destruction of humanity in the quarantine area. Excrement covers sidewalks, dogs munch on human corpses, the blind rot in the stores after futile attempts to find food. Even the saints in the churches are blinded. The world is a bleak picture of desolation and destruction.
We don't know why it happened - whether it's a test, a warning, or a punishment. Instead, we get a nagging haunting feeling that the real blindness was there all along - the blindness towards the others, the blindness towards our real selves, and the physical blindness served as a way to unveil it.
What was always there but went unseen before because it used to be easy to shrug off. Fear. "Us against them" attitude. Greed. Contempt. Hatred. Selfishness. Love of power. Cowardice. Apathy. Isolation. Filth. Rape. Murder. Theft. Ignorance. Indifference. Blaming the victim. It was all already there, and blindness amplified it. And, as society decays and falls apart, the question of what is means to be human comes up.
“I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
Things that made us human are gone. Faces don't matter. Names don't matter. Homes don't matter. Possessions don't matter. Shame and modesty are gone. Medicine is useless. Government is useless. Morals seem obsolete. Empathy is gone. Is anything left? Anything inside us?
“The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.”
The vestiges of humanity are the only rays of hope in this bleak world. The girl with the dark glasses taking care of the boy with the squint. The man with the eye patch and his love. And the doctor's wife, the only one who retained her sight.
Why? Was it because she was the most human? Or maybe she remained human because she retained her sight? Who knows? She is quiet and caring, leading the blind, washing the raped women, weeping over the dead but killing if she must. She sticks by her morals even if she is forced to violate them. She is the guiding light and the quiet hero in this world of
darkness whiteness, keeping her charges from degradation without expecting anything in return.
“If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.”
The style of this book may not be for everyone (disclaimer: I loved it!). The pages are filled margin to margin with solid wall of text. There are no dialogue marks, and the seemingly mundane bits of everyday speech are separated only by capital letters. Sometimes you need to almost read the sentences out loud to get a feel for who is speaking (it's very fitting that the book about the blind is better perceived in a non-visual medium). The sentences are long (in a European fashion), run-on, and beautifully punctuated. It is not a book to skim, it requires concentration, and definitely is not a light read. If all of the above does not scare you, you should give this one a try.
I will finish this review with the plea in the epigraph for this thought-provoking eye-opening (no pun intended) book:
"If you can see, look. If you can look, observe." Please, do. Let's try to look past our own blindness and actually see.
Rating: really liked it
When you sit in a coffee shop at the corner of two busy streets and read a book about blindness, you find yourself thinking unfamiliar thoughts, and you believe, when you raise your head to watch the people passing, that you see things differently. You notice the soft yellow light of the shop reflecting off the bronze of the hardwood floors. You notice among the people coming from the train two girls who intersect that line, spilt, call back, and go their ways, dividing into the two directions of larger traffic. When the girl working the shop goes out and leans against the brick entrance – to clear her head of coffee smells or just to see more of the sky – you feel the breeze blow in, and you smell it, and you feel that all these things – the sights and smells of a place you already know – are now something different. The place you know, you don’t know. It becomes mysterious, romantic: a newness you don’t have to search for, or travel toward, because you are already among it. You only want to feel more of it sweep over you, and as a result feel new yourself. If only for a few minutes longer.
You walk home and notice a discarded knit hat at the foot of a tree; you see the street cleaners’ orange signs tied to tree trunks, lampposts, telephone poles. You see a train run alongside you the color of the silver clouds, of the reflected golden light. You see people, in all their shapes, walk past you, each individual and anonymous. You feel anonymous yourself, and therefore more forgiving, more patient. You think everything is possible. You think everything possible must already exist. You think again of something you already believe: that people read the books that find them. That stories arrive to tell themselves, as relevant as news.
A little King, a little Camus, a little Gabriel Garcia: which is to say Blindness is a lot of everything.
Rating: really liked it
”The advantage enjoyed by these blind men was what might be called the illusion of light. In fact, it made no difference to them whether it was day or night, the first light of dawn or the evening twilight, the silent hours of early morning or the bustling din of noon, these blind people were for ever surrounded by a resplendent whiteness, like the sun shining through mist. For the latter, blindness did not mean being plunged into banal darkness, but living inside a luminous halo.” 
We have all experienced blindness. Not that long ago I woke up in the middle of the night. There was no reassuring red glow of the digital clock by my bed nor the diffused yellow light from the streetlight making slat patterns across my floor . The dark was ink vat black, not gray or any other color on the spectrum, dark soul black.
My eyes ached from holding them open so wide trying to capture any stray light that could reassure me that the wonderful array of cones and rods in my eyes were still functioning. Any creak or thump took on so much more significance giving my active imagination ample incentive to flash an array of possible horrible scenarios. My heart rate climbs. I wondered if I’ve went blind. I think about the room full of books that will have no more significance to me than a pile of bricks or cement blocks, something I held reverence for that is now less than useless. I lay there in various stages of disbelief and reassurances until a sliver of light announced the dawn and my eyes, my beautiful eyes, luxuriated in those first rays of a new day. I could see.
The influenza epidemic of 1918 was one of the most terrifying events to happen to humanity in the 20th century even eclipsing two horrific world wars. 50 million people worldwide died suffocating from fluid filled lungs. Doctors were baffled, unable to find a cure or slow down the symptoms to allow the human immune system to have a chance. The disease had no compassion or any sense of a person’s economic situation, rich, poor, young and old all died. The average life expectancy in the United States dropped by twelve years.
And then it just disappeared. As if a magic number of dead had been reached. Can you imagine the fear that any flu symptoms must have inspired in people for years after the event?
The Blind Eyes Looked Fine.This book is about such an epidemic. An epidemic that spares no one. It begins with a man going blind while sitting in his car at a traffic light. He is brought to an opthamologist and his trip to see the doctor spreads this contagion at the speed of a prairie fire. The opthamologist is in the midst of researching this baffling disease when he goes blind as well. The government on the verge of panic rounds up all those infected in an attempt to contain the spread of the disease. The wife of the eye doctor packs his suitcase and even though she can still see packs her own clothes as well. When the government people come to get him she goes with him. They are taken to a vacant mental hospital. At first there are only a handful of people and then there are hundreds of people crammed into this facility. Soldiers are left to guard them and feed them. As more soldiers go blind fears become reality and in one such moment of desperation the soldiers fire into the crowd of blind people. The soldiers retreat and the blind are left with dead bodies to bury and spilled food to collect.
”Their hunger, however, had the strength only to take them three steps forward, reason intervened and warned them that for anybody imprudent enough to advance there was danger lurking in those lifeless bodies, above all, in that blood, who could tell what vapors, what emanations, what poisonous miasmas might not already be oozing forth from the open wounds of the corpses. They’re dead, they can’t do any harm, someone remarked, the intention was to reassure himself and others, but his words made matters worse, it was true that these blind internees were dead, that they could not move, see, could neither stir nor breath, but who can say that this white blindness is not some spiritual malaise, and if we assume this to be the case then the spirits of those blind casualties have never been as free as they are now, released from their bodies, and therefore free to do whatever they like, above all, to do evil, which as everyone knows, has always been the easiest thing to do.”Any supernatural element, spirits or otherwise take a backseat to living breathing humans when it comes to perpetrating evil. A gang of men, empowered by a gun wielding leader, take control of the food. All of the internees are asked to bring all their valuables to be assessed and traded for food and water. I had to almost laugh at this point because these thugs are trapped in pre-blindness thinking. What value will jewelry or paper money have with people that can’t see? A good belt or a pair of shoes or a glass of water or a sandwich are the only things of any real value anymore. Well there is one other thing that will continue to have value.
Women.The inmates have been split into groups by rooms. After the valuables have been exhausted as a bartering tool for food and water the thugs tell the groups that if they want to eat they need to send their women to them. Hunger is all consuming. When you are hungry you can not think about anything else other than finding food. Your body, as part of our survival instinct, makes you very uncomfortable. We can all say what we would be capable of doing and not capable of doing when we are sitting in a bar casually munching on free peanuts and pretzels between pints of beer. The fact of the matter is most of us have never felt real hunger. We have had moments where our stomachs rumble or experienced a headache due to a missed meal, but true hunger, not eating for days hunger we can only speculate about what that is like.
One man in the group sounding like some of the Republican candidates in this last election said:
”What did it matter if the women had to go there twice a month to give theses men what nature gave them to give.”I think even the women had no idea what it really would mean to be raped. They have all had sex, no blushing virgins among them. They were hungry too and after some speculation decide that they need to do this not only to feed themselves, but also their men. It is way beyond anything they could even imagine. It was horrible and Jose Saramago pulls no punches. Being raped by one man is bad enough, but when being raped by several men a woman has become an object, not even an object of desire, but merely a receptacle for lust. Being attractive, or smart or any of the things that made men desire her, in the world before blindness, are suddenly immaterial. She is faceless, a base unit to be used and abused devoid of the uniqueness that identify all of us beyond being just a male or a female.
As the world goes blind the wife of the doctor is left unaffected. She continues to help where she can, but is reluctant to let everyone know she can see. She would be a slave to the group if they ever found out she could still see. She breaks out with a group of people all identified by their past professions or by some other identifying marker. We never do learn any of their names as if their identities have escaped them with their loss of vision.
There is a sweet scene when the doctor and his wife first arrive back at their home.
”The doctor put his hand into the inside pocket of his new jacket and brought out the keys. He held them in mid-air, waiting, his wife gently guided his hand towards the keyhole.”The world is in chaos as blind people stumble everywhere looking for food and shelter. It is truly a horrific vision of a world disintegrating and brings home to me just how vulnerable we all are to a pandemic event or the loss of the electrical grid or for those with more fanciful terrors a zombie apocalypse.
Will you kill someone to live? 
Jose SaramagoJose Saramago by keeping the wife of the doctor immune to the disease gives himself a conduit to describe events. Without her the novel would have been difficult to write and would have been more difficult for us to read. We need vision and if we don’t have it ourselves we certainly need someone to provide it for us. There are lots of great themes in the novel, exploring the human condition and how we fail ourselves; and yet, eventually overcome the most severe circumstances. The text is a block of words with few paragraph breaks or markers to help us keep track of who is talking. This certainly adds to the difficulty of reading the novel, but I must counsel you to persevere. You will come away from the novel knowing you have experienced something, a grand vision of the disintegration of civilization and certainly you will reevaluate what is most important in your life. This is a novel that does what a great novel is supposed to do; it reveals what we keep hidden from ourselves.
To see all my latest book and movie reviews visit my blog at http://www.jeffreykeeten.com.
You can also like my Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Rating: really liked it
Just imagine that you are going about your daily life as you always do. It's a normal day; nothing out of the ordinary. But then, suddenly, without any forewarning, you go completely blind. One second seeing the world as you know it, the next experiencing a complete and unending whiteness.
Then imagine you go to the trusty health professionals so they can get to the bottom of it... the doctor doesn't know what's wrong with you, but you're confident he/she will figure it out and prescribe accordingly.
And then the doctor goes blind. But not just him - everyone you have come into contact with is experiencing the same sudden white blindness. The condition spreads and takes hold within a few hours... soon this contagious blindness is spreading like wildfire and no one knows how to cure it.
This book is so frightening and so...
realistic. Blindness is not an alien concept like monsters and ghosts, neither are contagious diseases. So imagine a disease that prompted sudden blindness; that spread from one person to another quicker than the common cold. This book feels like a story that could happen.
One of the main issues readers have with this - if they have any - is the writing style. It's written in huge blocks of text with little punctuation, no quotation marks, and many run-on sentences. It can get a little disorientating, but I guess that's the end of the world for you. I actually found it incredibly effective in creating the air of blind panic that Saramago clearly wanted to impart. People fumbling around in the whiteness, hoping no one around means them harm and being powerless to do anything about it if they did.
Someone once said:
"You are who you are when no one is watching." And in this world, no one is watching. Fear reigns and some will choose to exploit the fear or succumb to it. I thought it was a frightening and believable portrait of the disintegration of society.
Very highly recommended.Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube
Rating: really liked it
Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira = Blindness, José SaramagoBlindness (Essay on Blindness) is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago.
It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda.
In 1998, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Blindness was one of his works noted by the committee when announcing the award.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه دسامبر سال 1999 میلادی
عنوان: کوری؛ نویسنده: ژوزه ساراماگو؛ مترجم: اسدالله امرایی؛ تهران، مروارید، 1378؛ در 388ص؛ شابک 9646026702؛ چاپ سوم 1379؛ چهارم 1380؛ پنجم 1381؛ ششم 1383؛ هفتم 1384؛ هشتم 1385؛ نهم 1386؛ سیزدهم 1389؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان پرتقالی - سده 20م
مترجمین دیگر: «مهدی غبرائی، تهران، نشر مرکز، 1378؛ در 360ص؛ شابک: 9643054748؛ در 360ص؛ چاپ ششم 1383؛ عنوان دیگر هیولای سفید؛ چاپ دیگر نشر مرکز، 1382؛ چاپ بیست و پنجم 1394»؛ «کیومرث پارسای، تهران، روزگار، 1390، در 272ص»؛ «نسیم احمدی، تهران، نسل آفتاب، 1389؛ در 394ص؛ شابک 9786005845185»؛ «فاطمه رشوند، آوای مکتوب، 1392؛ در 263ص»؛ «مینو مشیری، تهران، علم، 1378؛ در 366ص؛ چاپ نهم 1381»؛ «ترمه شادان، تهران، هنر پارینه، 1393، در 420ص؛ چاپ دوم 1394»؛ «عاطفه اسلامیان، تهران، نگارستان کتاب، 1385، چاپ بعدی 1386؛ در 412ص»؛ «مرتضی سعیدی تبار، قزوین، آزرمیدخت، 1394، در 408ص؛ قم، آوای ماندگار، 1395؛ در 376ص»؛ «محمدصادق سبط الشیخ، تهرن، میرسعیدی، 1391، در 366ص، چاپ دیگر تهران، جمهوری، 1389، در 416ص، چاپ دیگر تهران، چلچله، 1394، در 368ص»؛ «بهاره پاریاب، تهران، رادمهر، 1389، در 400ص»؛ «فرزام حبیبی اصفهانی، تهران، میلاد، 1395، در 368ص»؛ «جهانپور ملکی الموتی، تهران، سپر ادب، 1395، در 362ص»؛ «زهره روشنفکر، تهران، مجید، 1392؛ در 392ص، چاپ دیگر تهران، آوای الف، 1392؛ در 392ص»؛ «محمدمهدی منصوریان، تهران، نیک فرجام، 1395؛ در 362ص»؛ «مجید شریفیان، تهران، شبگبر، 1394، در 279ص»؛ «زهره مستی، قم، نوید ظهور، 1394، در 382ص»؛ «فاطمه امینی، تهران، شاپیکان، 1394، در 415ص»؛ «میلاد یداللهی، تهران، ابر سفید، 1395؛ در 368ص»؛ «کورش پارسا، تهران، حوض نقره، 1390، چاپ سوم 1394؛ در318ص»؛ «عبدالحسین عامری شهرابی، تهران، دبیر، 1390، در 420ص»؛
ژوزه ساراماگو، نویسنده ی «پرتغالی» (زاده ی روز شانزدهم ماه نوامبر سال 1922میلادی و درگذشته روز هجدهم ماه ژوئن سال 2010میلادی) برنده ی جایزه ی «نوبل ادبیات» در سال 1998میلادی هستند؛ سبک ادبی منحصر به فرد، از ویژگی آثار «ساراماگو» است، ایشان از جملات بسیار طولانی استفاده میکنند، که گاه در آن جمله، زمان تغییر میکند؛ گفتگوها را پشت سرهم مینویسند، و مشخص نمیکنند که کدام جمله را، چه کسی گفته است؛ «ساراماگو»، پیرو سبک «رئالیسم جادویی» است، آثارش را با آثار نویسندگان «اسپانیایی زبان آمریکای لاتین»، میسنجند، اما ایشان خود را، ادامه دهنده ی ادبیات «اروپا»، و تأثیرپذیری خود را بیشتر از «گوگول»؛ و «سروانتس»؛ میدانند.؛
ایشان، در دل داستانهایشان، از جملات طعنه آمیز سود میبرند، تا ذهن خوانشگر را از رویدادهای خیال انگیز، و بیشتر تاریخی داستان خود، به واقعیتهای جامعه ی امروزی برگردانند؛ نوک پیکان کنایه های «ساراماگو» مقدسات مذهبی، حکومتهای خودکامه، و نابرابریهای اجتماعی است؛ رویکرد «ساراماگو» علیه مذهب، آنچنان در رمانها و مقالات ایشان آشکار است، که وزیر کشور «پرتغال» در سال 1992میلادی، در پی انتشار کتاب «انجیل به روایت عیسی مسیح»، نام ایشان را از فهرست نامزدهای جایزه ادبی «اروپا» حذف کردند، و کتاب را توهینی به جامعه ی کاتولیک «پرتغال» خواندند، «ساراماگو» پس از آن بود، که به همراه همسر «اسپانیایی» خویش، به تبعیدی خودخواسته به «لانساروت»، جزیره ای آتشفشانی، در «جزایر قناری» در «اقیانوس اطلس» رفتند، و تا آخر عمر در آنجا اقامت گزیدند؛ علیرغم تمام انتقاداتی که از نگرش بدبینانه «ساراماگو» نسبت به دنیا میشود، تعجب آور است که آثارش را خوانشگران «ایران» میپسندند؛ نامداری «ساراماگو» در «ایران» با ترجمه ی همین کتاب «کوری»، در سال 1378هجری خورشیدی، آغاز شد، «کوری» را تا امروز بیست و دوم ماه آذر ماه سال 1396هجری خورشیدی بیست و یک مترجم متفاوت به فارسی ترجمه کرده اند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 29/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 07/05/1400هجری خورشیدل؛ ا. شربیانی
Rating: really liked it
I finished this masterpiece last week and I let it to sink in a little bit before reviewing it. The power of this book was quite overwhelming at times and I had to stop reading for a few days at a time. I do not think there are many books that disturbed me like this one. Maybe Never Let Me Go but there the message was much more subtle.
Some say that the structure of the book makes it very hard to read. I suppose the voice in my head did quite a good job in reading it as I did not encounter any difficulty to follow the narration. What made it difficult to read at times were the images and smells that were projected into my brain. At some point It seemed that excrement odor was rising from the pages in front of me.
Short version of the plot. One day people start to go blind without any prior symptom. Frightened, the Government tries to restrain the blindness epidemic by isolating the blind people. The quarantine is not successful and more and more people go blind. The book focuses on the life of a few "patients" locked and guarded into a mental institution, among who lives the only person immune to blindness. The loss of sight reduces people to their primal instincts (good or bad) and soon we are witnesses of some unimaginable horrors in the fight for food/supremacy/life and to the demise of all social and moral institutions. However, there are people that still try to help and to keep a bit of humanity and decency.
“If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.” I thought that the book is a metaphor of the people that are walking through life without thinking about the violence and cruelty that is in front of them, their ignorance of anything that could menace their civilized life. I believe the book brings forward our fear/avoidance to see our mortality and the insignificance of our lives.
“I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
“Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.”
“This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice.”
Rating: really liked it
Not at all disturbing, not at all compelling and not at all interesting, Jose Saramago's Blindness only succeeds in frustrating readers who take a moment to let their imagination beyond the page. Yes, Saramago's story is a clever idea, and, yes, he creates an intentional allegory to force us to think about the nature of humanity, but his ideas are clearly those of a privileged white male in a privileged European nation. Not only do his portrayals of women and their men fall short of the mark, but Saramago has clearly never had to fend for himself in the world. If he did, he'd realize that there were a thousand easy answers to the dilemmas he created for his characters, and he could have then focused more on the internal filth of their souls than the external excrement of their bodies. Blindness is not worthy of a Nobel Winner.
Rating: really liked it
*edited on 27.05.2020
The word Attention was uttered three times, then the voice began, the Government regrets having been forced to exercise with all urgency what it considers to be its rightful duty, to protect the population by all possible means in this present crisis, when something with all the appearance of an epidemic of blindness has broken out, provisionally known as the white sickness, and we are relying on the public spirit and cooperation of all citizens to stem any further contagion, assuming that we are dealing with a contagious disease and that we are not simply witnessing a series of as yet inexplicable coincidences. The unanticipated and unforeseen events often strike us when we least expect them to, so much so that those could afflict you in the middle of a ride, which is still explicable. It could be one of those serendipitous and arbitrary events which happen in life but to find that you are not alone to be 'blessed' with such a travesty could numb your senses and send our entire existence for a toss, all your morals and ethics, essentially everything what life comprises of, may be gaping at you with an unfathomable existential horror. While the world is still grappling with dread of the CoVID-19, struggling hard with its all might to come to terms with the pandemic which is however yet in its embryonic phase, I noticed that quite a few people found somewhat declining fascination for dystopian, post-apocalyptic books coming to life with up surging beguile, I too found myself caught entwined with allure of the same. Though I have a bit of luxury in options-
The Plague by Albert Camus and
1984 by George Orwell, to name a few- but
Blindness made itself popped up out of sea of indecisiveness with eruption of glamour, the fact that
Jose Saramago’ s world have been still elusive to me, must have played a part in it. The flipping through the very first pages sends an eerie glimpse of what the book might hold in wholeness. There is an inexplicable utter chaos which announces itself through horrific disorder of humanity, the existence of human beings is reduced to just numbers (quite similar to what we are witnessing in CoVID-19); the consciousness of individual dies out in the wake of retaining the ‘society’, but those who are renouncing their beings, ostensibly not by choice, do not have their desire in it, which is otherwise not required as it is for amelioration of humanity, some of them could be burned in the fire of hell of nothingness to save all, the unrealized beings of them gaze with delusive hope, only to become one with hell. Ah! what could it be?
Blindness, it is, or is it really? We have been brought up with the notion of blindness in which a person loses its ability to see things as they are, more often than not it reveals out empathy and compassion from us. But could
Blindness draw out baffling horror out of humanity, perhaps if it succeeds in showing the ignominy of humanity to itself; probably that’s what
Jose Saramago has been able to achieve with this masterpiece. It just holds an inhuman mirror which shows humiliation of entire humanity, the farcicality of civilization to reveal our savage and primitive nature hidden under its inauthentic sheath of comfort, which is stripped down to rags of acrid and stifling truth, however appalling it may be. We invariably boast about feathers we have been able to add in the crown of humanity, over the years of civilization, but have we really moved a bit, transformed a bit from what we were,
Jose Saramago shattered such notions, if any, with disdain; but perhaps that is how we really are, the ghastly image he shows us is probably we are essentially.
Saramago invites us to his fantastical world, which has only one order that there are no orders- social or natural, with a shattering shriek as drivers of one of the vehicles in a seemingly ordered assortment of automobiles watches in horror as his eyes go white, everything they could perceive to send visual signals to the brain is white as if he has been thrown in a sea of white, quite unusual, earthly improbable, the mayhem follows, welcome to the world of
Saramago. The omnipotent blindness, as contagious as any influenzas on the planet could be, engulfs the entire world of the author, but is it just the influenza or it hides something else, more profound, more concrete underneath it, doesn’t it talk about shallowness of our orderly society, the feebleness of our standards.
…..Anyone who is going to die is already dead and does not know it, That we're going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, That's why, in some ways, it's as if we were born dead, …….The author handpicks around half a dozen characters and they have been quarantined in an abandoned military establishment, wherein they are left to themselves, their lives have been totally cut off from the outer world. Their existence has been suspended between being and nothingness, as if it doesn’t matter to those who are still considered civilized, but yet to be thrown in the hell of nothingness. The life of the quarantine camp briskly degenerates into an existential hell where the blind are victimized first by the way they have been rounded up and shoved into what was a mental hospital, after that they are not given proper food either, and most appallingly by how they are reduced in their attempt to stay alive. We see new sort of barter system in the camp, which eventually takes inhumane form as human beings are demanded in return of food. The dangled and unfulfilled existence of these characters takes us through the manifold possibilities of human wickedness wherein they have been reduced to just vermin who do not have say in the social order of humanity as if their existence is just an apparition, so much so that they have not been even given names, just referred by their professions or relations. However, they are still alive and as human as anyone could be but the society becomes oblivious to their existence. Could they spring their unfulfilled existences back from the hell of nothingness or they would be crushed down under the humongous pressure of disarray, indifference, contempt and atrocities committed by the orderly world.
Life as we know it, could be changed with the rules of nature, our society, our morals, ethics may not stand the savage duress of existence. It is not just the world out there which the inhabitants of the quarantine center have to take care of, we have witnessed on numerous occasions in the history of human civilization that whenever humanity is stretched to its inhumane limit, horrendous activities take birth, the social orders go for a toss, the primitive, archaic human instincts come to play and the world of Saramago is no exception either. We witness perhaps all possible horrendous and grisly acts of humanity, unfortunately as we are not blind, our eyeballs move as swiftly they could to watch murder, thefts and rapes; tears may flow down as a stream of water from those but perhaps our own shame keeps them withhold. The characters of
Saramago struggle with their need to connect with one another, form relations and bond as a community, and also with their need for individuality, there is a ever going tussle between individuality and community.
……. we went down all the steps of indignity, all of them, until we reached total degradation, the same might happen here albeit in a different way, there we still had the excuse that the degradation belonged to someone else, not now, now we are all equal regarding good and evil, please, don't ask me what good and what evil are, we knew what it was each time we had to act when blindness was an exception, what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter, forgive this moralising speech, you do not know, you cannot know, what it means to have eyes in a world in which everyone else is blind, I am not a queen, no, I am simply the one who was born to see this horror, you can feel it, I both feel and see it, ………….The author has been able to create here an alternate reality without touching the easily sought after characteristics of science fiction, he doesn’t dive into any parallel universes, instead he just shows a world which is so strange by the word go, yet so much our own world; it takes us to the uncomfortable and unwanted recess of our memory and imagination however it is always there, which shows the ability of the author. The book is more like a philosophical treatise, without being pedantic, on human existence which shows us our own fragility and fallibility through dismantling our society, crumbling our civilization to nothing. The things which we have amassed and hard earned over the years as a reward to swank our so-called hard work to categorized those as luxuries, which only distinctive could afford, are reduced to just basic things of necessity, even some of those glorified and proudly gloated things become useless as life come back to basic needs of survival.
…….. We are so afraid of the idea of having to die, said the doctor's wife, that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn,……..Do we have any hope then? Perhaps we do, otherwise we may not be reading this great piece of literature after progressing through so many hideous acts- genocides, wars, rapes, murders etc.- in our own history of civilization. Hope is a necessary evil, which instills confidence in you to move forward, though it may be shallow and baseless at times and that is all sometimes we need to put forth through madness of humanity.
Saramago doesn’t disappoint you here either. The major characters of
Saramago braved themselves to last extend of their perseverance, which comes out to be most essential of human qualities needed for survival, to remain afloat in this sea of white nothingness.
The prose of
Saramago is peculiar and inimitable with unique innovations one might come across. He takes movement of post-modernism to a different level altogether thereby constructing many long, breathless sentences, some of those may even go for more than a page, in which commas take place of periods, quotation marks, semicolons and colons. I have found something which one of its kind as far as narrative style of the book is concerned wherein narrative shift in the voices of characters may be identified with fist capital letter of the phrase, which may not be discernible immediately. The characters are referred to by descriptive appellations such as "the doctor's wife", "the car thief", or "the first blind man". Given the characters' blindness, some of these names seem ironic ("the boy with the squint" or "the girl with the dark glasses"), his style reflecting the recurring themes of identity and meaning, showing the imbecility and impotence of the existence of the characters. There is omniscient third person narrator amidst the changing but reliable narrative voices who, at times, tries to pull the reader into narrative showing glimpses of metafiction.
Saramago has used quite intelligently one of the characters to infuse intrusive narration through “the doctor’s wife” whose eye balls remain utilitarian throughout the madness of Blind people. She is an intelligent woman who full of survival instinct which is quintessential to exist in such mayhem. Gradually, she becomes “eye” to the main characters of the story as their existence become solely dependent on her will and act. What may appear a position of fortune is essentially an unfortunate gift to her in the city of Blind people as she has to witness all the horrors, horrific acts through her experienced but numb eyes. The doctor’s wife may also imply a type of internal narrator infused masterfully by the author to show the human virtues such as empathy, sympathy, co-ordination, assistance and perseverance amidst the madness of inhumanity.
One could not miss the ostensible impact of
Franz Kafka on the prose of
Jose Saramago, as his characters take the strange and outlandishly unusual events to be perfectly normal. In the start of the story itself, the sudden blindness of “the first blind man” reminds me of
The Metamorphosis in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one day to find himself transformed in to vermin, and which he accepts as an ordinary situation. Like
Kafka used to throw his characters into absurd and outlandish circumstances,
Saramago uses the settings of the novel to bring out the most extreme reactions from the characters. Likewise, we see that
Saramago, similar to
Albert Camus , uses the social disintegration of people to the extreme to study the fragility of our vices and virtues.
And since disasters never come singly, at that same moment the electricians went blind who were responsible for maintaining the internal power supply and consequently that also of the generator, an old model, not automatic, that had long been awaiting replacement, this resulted, as we said before, in the elevator coming to a halt between the ninth and tenth floors. It is like a social commentary using highly allegorical streamlined unique prose, as James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant", which may get sometimes a bit challenging to read due to its text having no quotation marks, no indentations when a speaker changes; however, if one could brave through initial pages then the book could not be put down. The book is highly enjoyable with traits of acerbic, ironical and wry humor through the existential horrors of life, dense but comprehensible, its impact is immediate and a reflection of the sensibility of Saramago, which is at once alive and significant.
……. , You mentioned that there are organised groups of blind people, observed the doctor, this means that new ways of living are being invented and there is no reason why we should finish up by being destroyed, as you predict, I don't know to what extent they are really organised, I only see them going around in search of food and somewhere to sleep, nothing more, We're going back to being primitive hordes, said the old man with the black eyepatch, with the difference that we are not a few thousand men and women in an immense, unspoiled nature, but thousands of millions in an uprooted, exhausted world, And blind, added the doctor's wife,………. 4.75/5
Rating: really liked it
Update. I said I would never read another Saramago because of his writing style. I did though. All the Names and Death with Interruptions. Both brilliant. But I listened to them. I wouldn't have appreciated them as much if I'd had to struggle through Saramago's idiosyncratic writing style.
_________________
In H.G. Wells 'In the Country of the Blind' the only person who can see suffers great discrimination and has to agree to have his eyes removed and become as blind as the rest of the people who over the generations have adapted to life without vision. In Saramago's book, the only person who can see is the heroine of the book. This is a device for telling the story which is the collapse of the social order as with just about all dystopian stories. One wonders if, given time, those blinded by the disease wouldn't adapt as in Country of the Blind? And if they did so, then resent those who could see and instead of relying on the few sighted people for help despise them for the obvious power they have. Perhaps even suspect them of exploiting that power for their gain and the blinds' detriment.
I read the book and watched the film. I didn't find Saramago's style easy to read. Extremely long sentences, endless paragraphs and an idiosyncratic grammar made me have to concentrate on the reading more than the subject matter. It was worth it, but written in standard English I think I would have enjoyed it more. The film was a good, standard, Hollywood film meaning it appeals to the masses, has pretty people and no depth and has been designed to make money. I quite enjoyed it, but am glad I read the book first.
Although I found this book interesting, I didn't find it the cutting edge work of genius that I had read about. I don't think I would ever read another Saramago because life is too short to struggle through such a difficult writing style. The book took me about three times as long as if it had been written in a more usual manner. It seems to me to be an ego thing to write in a way that is completely different to everyone else. The reason there is a standard way of writing is that it is easy for us all to understand rather than having to adapt to anyone's idiosyncratic idea of spelling and grammar.
Writing is communication and understanding is key. This applies just as much to the reviewers on GR who don't ever use paragraphs and or/capital letters, but it's one thing reading a review and another a whole book - I'm prepared to go along with someone's style if they write good reviews (view spoiler)
[reasonably short ones. Write an unparagraphed essay-length review and you've lost me (hide spoiler)], but a whole book.... no, not again.
Rating: really liked it
We don't know what year it is, we don't know what city it is, all we know is that one minute a person can see, the next minute they can't. It's a white blindness that obliterates all vision immediately and is assumed to be highly contagious.
An early band of affected citizens is sent to a mental ward, in the hopes of containing this sudden epidemic of blindness. Only one among them can see, a woman as unnamed as anyone else in the story, but we come to know her as “the doctor's wife.”
And, since some 14,000 reviews already exist on Goodreads for this disturbing classic, I'm not going to summarize the plot, I'm not going to look up literary criticism and spit it out. . .
I'm going to write about my new favorite character: the doctor's wife.
The doctor's wife is an educated woman in her late 40s; a childless woman who's married to an ophthalmologist and seems to be both his intellectual and emotional equal. They're a “power couple,” so to speak, the types of pillars of society that have the mayor over for dinner.
This woman is devoted to her husband, so much so, she feigns blindness to be transported to the “holding tank” of the asylum while all others around her are actually afflicted with the condition.
This woman becomes the “eyes” for her husband and the band of people placed in her ward, and she simultaneously becomes the “eyes” for the reader. We see everything through her, and we quickly see her conundrum as well. If she reveals her advantage, she may be forced to abandon her blind husband and she may be misused for ill gain. If she conceals her advantage, she can not communicate to others the bad shit that's taking place all around them.
And by “bad shit,” I mean
bad shit. I was visibly shaking and unable to sleep after arriving at page 163. It's a scene I'd like to rub right out of my mind, perhaps with sandpaper?
You see. . . it turns out, people kinda suck. They don't want to properly ration the food or be fair. They don't want to share their blankets or their hairbrushes. And, once they've been relegated to living like animals, they want to act like animals, too.
A particularly bad band of men emerges, thieves and criminals who were probably bad before they were caged like animals. Now they want to take and break everything in the asylum, including the women.
The doctor's wife sees everything, and she is in the best and the worst position of all. She sees what needs to be done, but she must do it alone, and do it while the men sell-out her and every other woman in their ward (MEN OF WARD ONE—YOU SONS OF WHORES, I WILL NEVER, EVER FORGIVE YOU).
As the devil himself paws at the doctor's wife with his cloven hooves, wanting to do great harm to her, he concludes, “This one is on the mature side, but could turn out to be quite a woman.”
Truer words were never spoken, Motherfucker.
From that point in the story, I was so focused on revenge, I became the goddamned Count of Monte Cristo. I couldn't be with my family at dinner without discussing the pitfalls of the white blindness, I couldn't stop pestering my buddy Pedro, who got me into this mess in the first place, and I haven't had a decent night's sleep in a week.
I wanted to reach out to the doctor's wife, tell her I was here for her. I could not believe she was tasked with being the only one who could SEE the problem, and I could not believe how much had been laid at one woman's excrement-covered feet. I wasn't surprised when she privately wished for the blindness to strike her, so she wouldn't be asked to show up and save the world.
The doctor's wife reminded me of so many women I have known who have been abandoned by their partners. So many women who have had to shoulder up and do the job of both woman and man, both mother and father.
For anyone who has ever had the revelation at the end of the day that this world is full of too many cowards. . . I offer up to you: the doctor's wife.
I prayed that I should never be assaulted, for I knew I would strike back, even though I would have to pay for it with life itself. --Gerda Weissmann Klein
Rating: really liked it
“I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
José Saramago’s Blindness can be viewed as an allegory for a world where we see but in fact neglect what is around us. It is a human condition, unquestionable a disease that in contemporary time has only agravated.
"..blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone."
Blindness is more than a dystopian novel, it is a philosophical work that makes us wonder about our way of living. Moreover, it brings forth the horrifying truth of how the loss of only one sense can almost instantly dismantle our society, our civilization crumbles to nothing. People are reduced to living in unimaginable filth and rummaging for food and water like animals.
"We're going back to being primitive hordes, said the old man with the black eyepatch, with the difference that we are not a few thousand men and women in an immense, unspoiled nature, but thousands of millions in an uprooted, exhausted world, And blind, ..."
So, it is all about being human, with its own fundamental virtues and vices. In a world without vision only our voices remain. A revolution, you could say: people are no longer identified by their appearances, now worthless. Outward values are replaces by what kind of person each one is. Social statuses as we knew them are no more. And in a new disorganized world:
"There must be a government, said the first blind man, I'm not so sure, but if there is, it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness. Then there is no future..."
Saramago’s work reminded me of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, both are about the crumbling of our civilization as we know it.
Blindness is a masterpiece and an important reminder for us to be appreciative of several things that we take for granted, to look around and really see. Without an honest and accurate vision our very existence can disintegrate.
___
Rating: really liked it
Imagine the most ordinary situation in the world.
People waiting at a traffic light. All of us can see that before our inner eyes, relive thousands of similar situations we have experienced ourselves, without ever giving them a moment of consideration. Thus starts Saramago's Blindness. But there is a disruption. One car is not following the rules all take for granted. The car doesn't move when the light switches to green. People are annoyed, frustrated, disturbed in their routines, but not worried:
"Some drivers have already got out of their cars, prepared to push the stranded vehicle to a spot where it will not hold up the traffic, they beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head in their direction, he is clearly shouting something, to judge by the movements of his mouth he appears to be repeating some words, not one word but three, as turns out to be the case when someone finally manages to open the door, I am blind."
I AM BLIND. This is the beginning of what my son labelled the scariest book he ever read, and yet such a perfectly brilliant masterpiece. Similar to Camus' La peste and Ionesco's Rhinocéros in more than one respect, it takes the reader to the darkest abyss of despair and filth and pain.
Deprived of the sense of seeing, the characters have to cope with brutal bestiality and suffering to survive in a world limited by the loss of vision - an accurate symbol for overview, control, and objective judgement of reality. If Camus' characters are invaded by plague-stricken rats and dying of the disease, Saramago's society breaks down even more completely when the epidemic blindness strikes. Humans turn into beasts, comparable to the rhinofication in Ionesco's allegory on community collapse.
One character, a Cassandra of sorts, is excluded from the plague, and she guides the plot with her seeing eyes. What she sees is unbearable, even to the reader. Rarely have I felt more shaken than while reading the scene with the blind thugs raping hungry women. The seeing woman steps in and uses her power to break off the horror show, but it will leave a scar on my reading inner eye forever. Bizarrely, that means a scene I never actually saw is engraved on my visual memory.
When reflecting on why the women didn't fight back from the beginning when the opportunist gangsters started to take control of the blind community, they give the same reasons as so many women facing sexual abuse:
"We failed to put up resistance as we should have done when they first came making demands, Of course, we were afraid and fear isn't always a wise counsellor..."
Desperate needs, inequality of power, shameless gang mentality, helplessness in an exposed situation, loss of control, all these things play a role. And the humiliation of being exploited as an object without individual value is not diminished in blindness. Inside, we remain seeing.
An allegory of the breakdown of civilisation, Blindness is also the story of those who finally start resisting raw violence and brutal force, and of those who see through the darkness. However, even as the blind spell breaks, and people are regaining their vision, the world is changed forever. Blindness has become a real threat, a terrifying possibility lurking underneath everyday worries. If it can happen once, it can happen again. And who knows when? You may be waiting at a traffic light, and all of a sudden, life goes white...
The one person who remains seeing through the whole catastrophe realises in the end that people might not actually have been literally blind at all:
"Blind people who can see, but do not see."
That is a tragic reflection on humankind. We turn to mass blindness in periods, not because we are physically unable to see, but because we DO not see. We can see, we have the tools for seeing, but we do not use them - not as long as the cars keep moving when the traffic lights turn green. We only start to see that we do not see when we turn blind and there is a disruption in our unseeing complacency.
We sometimes need an epidemic blindness to wake up and see what happens underneath the polished surface of our civilisation.
Let's use our eyes, literally and figuratively, to see what we need to see. Let's not turn a blind eye to the world's troubles! We know we can easily fall into the barbaric state of blindness. It has happened before.
Let's not forget blindness in order to keep our vision clear.
Rating: really liked it
It is easier for me to lambaste a book when it is a translation; after all, maybe it is not the author who should be held accountable for the text’s flaws. Whether or not the translator is culpable, Blindness indeed has many flaws.
First: In order, one must assume, to make the reader’s experience as tantamount to the characters’ as possible, there are no names and no quotation marks to indicate speech. That’s fine enough, but he chooses not to use periods either, that makes almost every sentence, whether it is conversation or not, a long-ass run-on, there is no reason for it, it is not like the final chapter of Ulysses, the whole thing just pissed me off and made me hate reading, good books don’t do that.
Second: The narration, or rather the narrator, is not consistent. It/he/she/they shift from third person omniscient, to third person limited, to first person seemingly present in the scene, to first person removed and either omniscient or limited, to first person plural all of the above. This is not like Mitchell’s books in which different characters narrate different sections—this is just one voice that paradoxically and capriciously changes. Oh, and that has reminded me that the tense suddenly shifts from past to present then shifted back to past then shifts again all arbitrarily. Pathetic!
Third: Unfortunately, the only constant that the narrative voice does have is a meaninglessly verbose style. While I laud Nabokov for one sentence that appears to be a paragraph, that is only because that sentence is composed of so many beautiful parts (all punctuated correctly, no less) that work together to create an even more beautiful image. This writing is more akin to the wandering, rambling speech of Grandpa Simpson which, while hilarious on The Simpsons, has no place within this story.
Finally: The countless instances in which suspension of disbelief is just impossible. A whole city/country/world suddenly goes blind? Okay, sounds like an interesting premise—I’ll buy it. How the author has these newly-blinded people speak and act, well that’s just too much. My main gripe is actually with the primary protagonist, the Doctor’s wife, the only one who does not lose her eyesight. Her utter lack of action and sense of responsibility for the majority of the book almost made me quit reading. I would suggest that one of the themes evident is how readily civilization/morals/mores/humanity/meaning can deteriorate when something changes (like, for instance, being stranded on a desert island with only your schoolmates or Camus' The Plague). My contention is the seeing-woman, who is clearly supposed to be portrayed as the hero, is responsible for many of the injustices and just downright abominable acts that happen. Does she cause them? No. But does she prevent them from happening? No. After all, there’s some saying like “with great eyesight comes great responsibility” or something like that, but for all the trite aphorisms she spouts she must not have heard that one. Hers read like lines in a “B” (at best) grade movie: “We are already half dead, said the doctor, We are still half alive too, answered his wife,” “The woman I was then wouldn’t have said it, I agree, the person who said it was the woman I am today, Let’s see then what the woman you will be tomorrow will have to say…” and “it is his duty to follow her, one never knows when one might have to dry more tears.” All stagy, affected drivel. Finally, hey woman who can see: why not grab a damn flashlight when going down a dark hall or worrying about night setting in? Yes, silly things like that bothered me. They are the things I can overlook in that “B” action movie, but not in a good book.
Rating: really liked it
Blindness is a great novel by Portuguese writer José Saramago that deals with human's individual and collective reactions when in the face of adversarial forces. With gorgeous prose, this thought-provoking book shows us how our world, ever so concerned and consumed by appearances, would deal with the loss of our most relied upon sense: vision. When it's every man by himself, when every man is free to do whatever he wants without the impending fear of recognition and judgement, we start to
feel - I was going to say
see - what the man's true nature is and the crumbling down of a civilization diseased with selfishness, intolerance and ambition, to name just few symptoms.
Saramago tells us the story of a mysterious mass plague of blindness that affects nearly everyone living in an unnamed place in a never specified time and the implications this epidemic has on people's lives. It all starts inexplicably when a man in his car suddenly starts seeing - or rather stops seeing anything but - a clear white brightness. He's blind. Depending upon a stranger's kindness to be able to go home in safety, we witness what appears to be the first sign of corruption and the first crack in society's impending breakdown when the infamous volunteer steals the blind man's car. Unfortunately for him, the white pest follows him and turns him into one of its victims as well.
Spreading fast, this collective blindness is now frightening the authorities and must be dealt with: a large group of blind people and possibly infected ones - those who had any contact with the first group - have now been put in quarantine until second order. Living conditions start to degrade as the isolated population grows bigger, there is no organization, basic medicine is a luxury not allowed in and hygiene is nowhere to be found. To complicate things further, an armed clique acquires control and power, forcing the subjugated to pay for food in any way they can. The scenes that follow are extremely unpleasant to read, but at the same time they're so realistic that you can't be mad at Saramago for writing such severe events packed with violence that include rapes and murders.
Contrasting with this dystopian desolation, there is some solidarity and compassion in the form of one character: the doctor's wife. The only one in the asylum who miraculously is still able to see, she takes care of her husband and of those who became her new family: the girl with the dark glasses, the boy with the squint, the old man with the black eye patch, the first blind man and the first blind man's wife - the characters' names are never mentioned, which is an interesting choice the author made. When we think of someone, when we hear their name, we always conjure an image in our head; a picture is formed before our eyes. Here we are with a bunch of people who no longer can rely on their sight so, in not giving them names, Saramago also puts us in the dark, forcing us to rely instead on personal characteristics and descriptions given to conjure these characters ourselves.
After an uprising, folks find out the asylum has been abandoned by the army who was until then responsible for it and they're able to leave. Realizing that what they went through in quarantine was only a detail in the huge landscape, now we follow our protagonists as they wander through the city in search of better conditions: water, food, clothes, a way to find their homes and their relatives.
Talking about Saramago's writing style, I should say that it may be a bit confusing at first due to the lack of punctuation; there are many long sentences and no quotation marks around dialogues. But in no time you'll get used to his simplistic style - not in any way devoid of meaning or deepness -, and you'll realize that it actually adds to this reading experience as you'll be going faster through the words; with fewer pauses and breaks, you'll find yourself feeling suffocated and almost breathless, which will only add to the book's atmosphere of urgency, anxiety and despair.
Film adaptation: there is a good film by Fernando Meirelles also called Blindness starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Gael García Bernal, released in 2008. While this adaptation isn't as graphic and visceral as Saramago's novel, it's still worth seeing. It is said that Saramago was in tears when the movie ended and said to director Meirelles: "Fernando, I am so happy to have seen this movie. I am as happy as I was the day I finished the book."
Rating: unfortunately, it seems the late José Saramago - the only Portuguese-language novelist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature - has yet to gain the world recognition he deserves. For his torturing novel, for his fearlessness in going deep and telling a brutal and violent story that makes us wonder, as Virginia Woolf greatly put it, "Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we attractive as a species?": 5 stars.
Rating: really liked it
Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.Goodness me. The horror. The terror. These two moist pulpy vibratile objects of anatomy, one on either side of the nose, 'the window to the soul', are steering wheels of the body, the basis of all order in the fragile human world, without which the purpose of evolutionary biology is moot. What would it be like if everyone was struck by an epidemic of blindness, sudden and inexplicable, you and I 'catching' blindness from one another? This novel explores the premise to the fullest possibility. Saramago sets the scene with a cast of half a dozen characters who are quarantined in an abandoned army barracks for the purpose of containing the epidemic. And then the chaos ensues.
This novel is as much an exploration of the horrendous possibilities created by the dysfunction of anatomy as it is of the limits of human resilience to resist consummate annihilation. After all the process of evolution has taught us very little; we adapt to external dangers but we fail when something goes amiss inside our bodies. We would live longer had it not been the case.
Our seven major characters go to great lengths to remain floating in a world wherein the social order has suffered a total breakdown. People lost their identity when they lost their eyesight. So the writer doesn't bother to name those phantom-like humans who can't see and be seen. They are first blind man, first blind man's wife, blind doctor, the doctor's wife, the boy with the squint, the girl with glasses, the old man with the black eyepatch. I admire Saramago's other stylistic inventions. Dialogue is not set in quotes; every first-person utterance starts with a capitalised alphabet to separate it from the narrating voice. Full stops come rarely. Paragraphs which run in length into multiple pages chain you to the text that you can't tear your eyes off. This is truly
spellbinding.I'm still reeling from the blind rapes (we don't need seeing eyes to
feel the excitement of skin and flesh, the blind men made full use of this truth), half-eaten corpses stuck in abandoned cars and looted foodstores, and squelch of feet on human excrement littering the streets that I will need to clear my head and read something light.
But without doubt it's a brilliantly told story, a fascinating study into human failings, if you allow for the vicarious witnessing of the horror of human degradation to be called fascinating. In-between Saramago manages to create comedy out of tragedy. This is not a new phenomenon in literature but Saramago's treatment has been so light and deadpan that you could deny he ever meant to be ironically humorous in its telling.
In one scene from the quarantine a group of soldiers on duty entered the premises to bring foodboxes to the blind internees who had been ordered to stay out of sight for fear of passing on their blindness to healthy ones. But as chance would have it, the mealtime had passed and the hungry internees moved toward the entrance, crashing into one another with outstretched arms and unsteady steps in the manner of Egyptian mummies, to reach the foyer so that they could shout to demand food. Just at that moment soldiers entered the place and, on spotting a group of staggering and tottering blind men, howled in utter terror, dropped the boxes and their guns and fled the building to be away from the field of vision of the blind internees! This was a powerful and ironic instance of the seeing terrified of the blind and the hapless.
I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
March 2015
Edited 25th July 2015.
