 |
 |
Sign in/joinLanguage: English [ others ]
Over forty million books on members' bookshelves.
|
Loading... Blindnessby José Saramago
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendations
Loading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This was absolutely fantastic. I think that really what it does, instead of showing how a society survives after being struck blind, is show how even the smallest of actions can have consequences and repercussions far outside of ourselves. palindrome80 | Jul 7, 2009 |   I liked this but did not love it. (  )StephJoan | Jul 1, 2009 | This is definitely a disturbing novel, but for me it was a quick read. I found myself horrified, but unable to stop reading. It makes you ponder our existence as a whole and the things that we take for granted every day, which is summed up in the last few sentences of the book. What a sad portrait of disarray, chaos, anarchy... I definitely recommend this to anyone who needs a reminder that we are truly blessed by our good fortune and all that goes along with it ( )sherriey | Jun 30, 2009 | Summary: An ordinary man is sitting at an ordinary traffic light when suddenly he goes blind - not a black darkness, but an all-pervasive whiteness. It turns out that this blindness is contagious, and it spreads through the city at a rapid pace. Fearing an epidemic, the government inters the blind people in an old mental hospital, hoping to quarantine the sickness. The story follows a group of blind prisoners, including a doctor who treated the first blind man, and his wife, who is somehow immune to the blindness, but must keep the fact that she is the only sighted person to herself, as more and more people are struck blind, and the rules that govern normal society fall apart faster and faster. Review: I only got about 40% of the way through this book before I had to give it up. While I understand the point Saramago was trying to make about the fragility of society's rules and the more unpleasant aspects of human nature, the story was just too grim and too bleak for me. I don't require my literature to be all rainbows and puppies and people hugging all of the time; I'm capable of dealing with unpleasant topics and characters and behaviors. However, this book just felt like people being hopelessly, unrelentingly horrible to each other, and after a certain point, it stops feeling like examining the nastier side of human nature, and starts feeling like wallowing in the nastier side of human nature, which is not something I particularly enjoy. (Particularly when several people told me that I wasn't even to the *really* horrible parts of the book yet. No thank you.) I had been listening to the audiobook, since lack of proper punctuation and undelineated dialogue annoys the heck out of me, and I'm more than happy to let the audiobook narrator do the heavy lifting of deciding who's speaking, and where the sentence breaks should be. After the horribleness got to be too much for me to listen to, I picked up the paper copy... for about two pages, until I came across three pages in a row with no paragraph breaks. Sorry; I'm sure this is a fine book of Serious Allegory and High Literary Merit, but it's just not for me. Recommendation: Only for those whose tolerance levels for people being horrible to each other are a lot higher than mine. (  )fyrefly98 | Jun 15, 2009 | 1  This book frightened me. All of what makes us human comes from our sense of sight. When it is removed, we decline into animals. I can’t even imagine the horror of trying to navigate this world without being able to see. The authorities who throw the newly blind into the asylum are only trying to protect society at large from a potentially devastating illness, but it is hard to feel anything but anger at them. Sympathy for the newly blind is overwhelming. They are thrown in there and basically left to their own devices. Food is delivered once a day at a designated area. If the blind go to near to this drop zone, they are shot. It’s frustrating in more than just the obvious ways – after more people arrive, the food rations remain at the same level. So instead of feeding 12 people, it starves 20. When one of them is injured, no medical assistance is given. He dies and they must bury him in the yard. No shovels are given. Hygiene is a thing of the past. The blind shit and piss all over once the old septic system is overwhelmed and overflows. No one washes anymore. No tampons or pads are provided for the women. After more and more people arrive, it is no surprise when some criminals start to take the food and hold the others hostage to it. In a hilariously twisted scene, they demand the valuables and money of the weaker group. What the hell for? What possible value can a gold watch have to a blind man? Soon, the money runs out and the demand the next obvious commodity – women. This is the most degrading part of the book and it took me forever to finish this part because it made me sick. When some of the men on that side started to protest they were almost rent by the women with their bare hands. How dare they question the methods by which they were being fed? If the criminals had demanded men, would they have gone? Eventually, the one woman who can see kills the criminal leader and all hell breaks out. The asylum burns and they are freed into the city. This is no better. It’s chaos and anarchy. People wander the streets in search of food. Shit, piss, vomit, trash and corpses litter the public areas. ( )Bookmarque | Jun 14, 2009 | 0.053 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0156007754, Paperback)In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:02 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
Abebooks |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
