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Loading... Blindnessby José Saramago
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  wookiebender | Nov 17, 2009 |  This was my first Saramago book and I literally could not put it down. I loved how the text actually made me feel as though I too was blind - despite the fact that I was visually absorbing the words off the page. I've been disappointed by the fact that none of my friends have shared my enthusiasm. (  ) ascgrrl | Oct 23, 2009 | Just gorgeous bleakness. And although few could end a story like this with utmost satisfaction, I was still very happy with my first taste of Saramago. (  ) nickiplum | Oct 19, 2009 | In Blindness, Portuguese Nobelist José Saramago's dystopian fable, unnamed people in an unnamed country are suddenly stricken blind. Due to fear of contagion, the early victims are herded into asylums, offered no medical help, given meager rations, and left to themselves to organize a civilized community - or not, as it turns out. This book cries out for discussion, but I would not recommend it to any book club that prefers uplifting, ladylike books. It is harrowing and graphic. I had tears in my eyes at one point, not from sadness exactly but from...horror, I guess. As for the writing style, Saramago employs run-on sentences in long paragraphs, with dialog set off only by quotation marks, so it is sometimes hard to puzzle out who is speaking. I've mentioned before that I find the lack of quotation marks a distancing device, but that was not the case here. The writing creates the kind of disorientation that the newly blind might be experiencing. My brief and untutored review can't do justice to a book that demands more analysis. I'm still thinking about it. ( )2  CasualFriday | Oct 12, 2009 | A friend picked this book for a book club discussion and ultimately, I found it incredibly over-rated. The premise is interesting enough, but I did not feel it had anything new to say about what would happened in the world if we we all plunged into an epidemic, such as a "white blindness" that strikes for no apparent reason (but certainly looks to be contagion). Some people would be thugs and act like animals, some would not. Yet others would be quiet heros. That is all played out here amidst a bunch of nameless (e.g., "the girl with the dark glasses") people, all of whom are rather unsympathetic characters. I suppose it is art, but the neverending run-on sentences and lack of grammar wore on me. It was often hard to tell, without quotes and direction, who was saying what, and to whom. But probably the most difficult to slug through was the oppressive gruesomeness of it all (the feces, bodily functions, corpses, forced sex and endless description of how filthy the "asylum" for the blind internees was). There are moments of beautiful prose, when one of the characters would be tender towards another, but those moments are few and far between. The books jacket says this becomes a story of "man's ultimately exhilirating spirit" but boy, I did not find that to be the case. I kept reading that sentence as the book dragged on, wondering when I would discover that. While certainly "respite" comes to some, one could never say this novel had any exhilirating spiritual elements to it! Not sure if I can recommend this to anyone I know. (  ) CarolynSchroeder | Oct 1, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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| Book description |
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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)
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I was, truth be told, quite relieved to put it down and move on to more entertaining fare.