Blindness (Panther)

While Lord of the Flies might seem an immediately similar reference, Saramaga's work has both more craft and more acuity than William Golding's tale. Blindness is a luminous piece and a wonderful starting point for readers seeking a scrupulous and wise guide to these injudicious and myopic times. --Mark Thwaite

Reader Reviews:

Frightening, but compelling... (0/0 people found this helpful)

Now on the cusp of a forthcoming film adaptation, which should hopefully bring it some much deserved extra attention, Jose Saramago's extremely provoking book "Blindness" is a wonderfully evocative, frequently disturbing read.

The premise is straight forward; an unexplained disease of sudden blindness plagues a (purposefully) unnamed city. The consequences are predictably devastating.

The key to your final interpretation of this book rests with how you adapt to Saramago's unusual style. This is a book built almost of a series of long paragraphs, practically uninterrupted by normal punctuation. Characters have whole conversations without quotation marks - and it's occasionally quite easy to get lost as to who is speaking to who. The overall effect is dizzying, complex, but quite brilliant. It's an immediate jolt that tells you this is something quite unique. Perhaps it's not the best comparison, but it's akin to when I read my first Cormac McCarthy novel. Something about how it's written just doesn't feel quite right at first.

Stick with it though and you're richly rewarded by a brutal story and frightening imagery that fully deserve your attention. This is a very impressive book.

5 stars is not enough (3/3 people found this helpful)

This book is amazing, incredible, breathtaking. It was recommended to me and once I started it 2 days ago I have barely been able to put it down. This book has just earned a place in my top 5 ever books and deservedly so.

The story starts with a man in his car at traffic lights who goes suddenly blind. He is helped home by a stranger, who a few hours later also goes blind. Within a few days the blindness has spread round half the city and also those afflicted are herded up by the government into a disused mental assylum and left alone. The wards quickly become overrun with filth and chaos ensues. In the middle of this, though, we get to know a handful of characters very well and it is really their story that we follow through the neverending days, lack of food and riots. The whole story is told through long paragraphs of uunbroken text. There are no quotation marks, hardly any punctuation and none of the characters are given names.

I admit to being concerned that I would find it difficult to overcome the lack of punctuation, but for commas and fullstops, and the lack of names (characters are referred to in such ways as the girl with dark glasses, the boy with the squint etc) but not only was it very easy to get used to this it actually added to the story. Also, although the characters don't have names, I found myself identifying with and caring about these characters far more than I have done in other books as Saramago writing drags you in and you find yourself unable to let go. It's as though I was "there". Genius!

If you read nothing else this year, make it this. It is astounding and I only wish I could award more than 5 stars.

Gripping (2/2 people found this helpful)

This is the novel which suits Saramago's prose style to a tee. Using only commas and full-stops, no paragraph breaks for speech, and only referring to characters with descriptive labels ("the woman in dark glasses" etc), Saramago paints a chaotic and nightmarish vision of an unnamed city thrown into an unholy mess by an epidemic of blindness: white blindness. The afflicted are rounded up and shipped into a disused mental asylum where they are quarantined and left to defend for themselves. What unfolds is a sequence of terrifying events as the blind struggle to cope with the unprecedented contagion. People are dying, sanitation is horrendous, a gang of blind thugs run riot, and yet amidst all the confusion and hopelessness one woman can still see. Slowly and secretly she influences the break-out. Will the world outside the asylum's walls be the world they left behind before the outbreak of the white blindness? - This is a gripping read: a powerful, shocking and brutally honest portrayal of human nature in an extreme situation.

Vivid and appalling (1/1 people found this helpful)

Blindness is the story of a city where everyone starts going blind. But it is very different from Day of the Triffids; the hostile entities endangering the lives of the newly blind are not giant plants but other human beings, the still sighted at first, and then other blind people. Saramago's view of the social breakdown is much more vivid and appalling than Wyndham's. How much of this is due to the catastrophe being gradual rather than sudden? to Saramago being Portuguese rather than English? to the novel being told largely from the viewpoint of the blind rather than the sighted? to Saramago being a better writer?

Saramago's characters and location have no names, and direct speech is not set apart from the rest of the text by quotation marks or new paragraphs, so the reader feels simultaneously dislocated and immersed in the catastrophe. It's a horrible vision of humanity; the book was published in 1995, so it's tempting to see direct reference to the Bosnian war, though of course there is inhumanity enough to go round from elsewhere. Yet, rather to my surprise, he incorporates a relatively upbeat ending.

Surreal and entertaining (2/5 people found this helpful)

What can one say: this crazy allegorical book by the Nobel prize winner engages the zany side of one's psyche. In my view, it is one of his best.

Jose Saramago

Editorial Review: