Blindness

Rating:
Summary: "An impenetrable whiteness covered everything."
Review: A friend encouraged me to read BLINDNESS, calling it "the best novel ever written." Nobel-Prize winner, Jose Saramago's book is about blindness, both literal and symbolic. Within a day after a character is struck blind while waiting at a traffic signal, other characters who then assist him--his wife, a Good Samaritan (who steals his car), a taxi driver, and an eye doctor--also go blind. Eventually no one is spared from the epidemic of "white blindness," and with one exception, the entire population goes blind. When the health authorites quarantine the blind victims in a guarded mental asylum, Saramago's novel not only becomes an insightful examination of human behavior, but a horrifying study of "a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organise nothingness" (p. 255). When there is no more water, electricity, or food, only chaos, civilization returns to "the primitive sources of slime" and a "world where all hope is gone" (pp. 209; 277). BLINDNESS may not be "the best novel ever written." But whether you read it as a thought-provoking thriller or as an insightful allegory about ignorance, Saramago's tale will blindside you with its unforgettable vision.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: A Great High-Wire Act
Review: Blindness is my introduction to Saramago. A good friend at Amazon suggested this writer to me. Though he'd won a Nobel, I'd never heard of him, which comes as no surprise as I've read only about half the Nobel winners' and am totally in the dark when it comes to about 15 names on the list.

What strikes me most stongly about this book is the author's challenges he sets up for himself early on. As more and more characters are introduced, the challenge of keeping track of who is speaking and who is where mounts exponentially. I kept saying to myself "How's he going to do it when the wards fill up?" As noted throughout the reviews, Saramago does not provide us with the usual authorial roadmap.

What surprises me is that only one other reviewer (Michael Lima) mentioned that this stylistic maneuvering is a great metaphor for the subject matter. As readers, we are disoriented by the lack of accustomed punctuation, among other things. We have to pause sometimes to get our bearings. "Who said that?" we ask ourselves. It's exactly appropos to the way the blind characters react in the novel. Saramago wants the reader disoriented so that the empathy we feel for his characters becomes more pronounced. We share an awareness of what they are experiencing first-hand. We too have to grope our way in the dark, without the usual guideposts. The characters go unnamed. As one of the chracters thinks to himself,"names are of no importance here." We know them only as "the first blind man" or the "girl with dark glasses" or "the doctor's wife." One reviewer objected to this device, citing "the dog of tears" as an example of Saramago's ineptitude. I would counter that this is another intentional choice on Saramago's part to maintain the purity of his allegory. Characters in true allegory are never specified by common name. Just think of Spenser's "The Fairy Queen" or Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" and you'll see what I mean. Saramago's characters operate as universal types in large part because they are nameless.

Often, Saramago provides us with stunning imagery, as in this example when the opthalmologist first discovers he is blind: "He turned to where a mirror was, and this time he did not wonder, What's going on, he did not say, There are a thousand reasons why the human brain should close down, he simply stretched out his hands to touch the glass, he knew that his image was there watching him, his image could see him, he could not see his image."

My only criticisms of the work are minor. They usually have to do with suspension of disbelief. I had to wonder why the doctor's wife didn't seize the thug's gun for instance after he was down. Also, when she entered the basement of the store, why didn't she first get a flashlight? Certainly that wouldn't have been an item that would have been hard to find under the circumstances. I also had a bit of difficulty digesting some of Saramago's homilies and folksy philosophizing, as in "her fingers brushed against the dead petals, how fragile life is when it is abandoned," or later: "...but none of us, lamps, dogs or humans, knows at the outset, why we have come into this world." Not exactly the most profound material around.

I would also differ with those who maitain that the narrative is detached or distant. Sometimes I found it obtrusive, as in the narrator's description of a statement made by the girl with dark glasses: "...surprisingly, if we consider that we are dealing with a person without much education, the girl with the dark glasses said, Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are." I would hold that this is a pretty condescending remark, intimating that a person with little formal education can come up with anything resembling profundity (which by the way, it doesn't anyway). There may be a hint of sexism creeping in here as well.

Please do not, however, let these few quibbles put you off from reading the book. It really does belong in the modern classical cannon along with Kazanzakis, the writer he most reminds me of. I have ordered The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, both on the strength of my response to this book, and because it came even more highly recommended by my friend at Amazon. I'm really looking forward to reading it.

Rating:
Summary: one of the best books i read all year
Review: this book was amazingly written. i loved it. it had a up beat and never lost your interest. it was pretty good.

Rating:
Summary: Worth the work
Review: Few writers have used style so effectively to simultaneously engage readers and force us to empathize with the characters. The lack of quotation marks, character names and paragraph breaks forces the reader to concentrate fully on the novel while reading it; this isn't a skimming book, or one you can read a few pages at a time. Just as the blind characters are immersed in their new condition, Saramago forces us to immerse ourselves in the story, making it much more rewarding to take it in heavy doses.

The vivid decriptions of the character's experiences - especially when they're interned in the asylum - make this a difficult bedtime story. In that sense, the haunting nature of the book cuts both ways. It sticks with you, gets into your head.

"Blindness" contains some horrifically graphic descriptions and a level of despair seldom seen in modern literature. While some of Saramago's points certainly lack subtlety (our modern dependence on machines and creature comforts), the more nuanced meditations on the range of human emotions are deeply touching, even unnerving in their exactness.

For those looking for books to compare it to, "Blindness" bears some similarity to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in terms of subject and content, and even style (see "Autumn of the Patriarch," which is similarly stingy with quotations and paragraph breaks). He makes the reader work hard, yet in this case, as with much of Garcia Marquez's novels, it's a task well worth undertaking.

Rating:
Summary: Undoubtedly Brilliant
Review: It has been awhile since I've read a book as amazing as this one. This story of a world ravaged by a "white blindness" is incredibly well-written and insightful. While reading this, I was reminded of one of my favorite books, Albert Camus' The Plague. Saramago's book, however, goes a step beyond.

In The Plague, Camus creates a group of people quarantined in their city because of an infectious and deadly disease. Saramago creates a group of people quarantined in an abandoned insane asylum because of what seems to be a transmitted but decidedly--and here's the point--non-fatal blindness. In both novels, how those quarantined deal with their situations on a personal level as well as how they organize themselves and treat each other is the issue. Interestingly, in Saramago's novel, the only deaths come from others and not from the disease itself.

Again in both novels we also see how those who on some level stand outside the disaster react. In Blindness it is the doctor's wife (names are unknown in this novel) who remains as the only sighted person in a sightless world. Despite being the only true witness to the horrors of this world, she somehow retains pieces of her humanity and helps those around her retain theirs.

I cannot say enough about the excellence of this novel. The choice of a unique blindness for the threat in this story was very smart since it is not deadly but, additionally, puts aside the issue of attempting to cure it since the doctors do not have the eyes to examine the "disease." The cross-section of characters gives wonderful insights into people and the encounters both inside and outside of the quaratine are believable and intersting.

But I don't want to say too much. Readers should experience this for themselves.

Rating:
Summary: A Luminous, White Blindness
Review: BLINDNESS is thought of by most people as Jose Saramago's masterpiece (although all of his works of fiction, with the exception of THE TALE OF THE UNKNOWN ISLAND are masterpieces) and, while I think THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS may be more sophisticated, I do think BLINDNESS encompasses the most universal theme.

BLINDNESS begins when a man in his car is waiting for a light to change. Before it does, however, he suddenly loses his sight completely. The blindness that has afflicted this poor driver is no "ordinary" blindness, however. Besides the speed with which it overtook him, it's a luminous whiteness rather than darkness.

The person who helps the man home is soon afflicted with the same blindness, himself, as is his wife and the doctor the first man consults. In fact, impossible as it sounds, this "white blindness" seems to be contagious and soon an entire group of people have been afflicted.

The blindness soon comes to be known as the "white sickness." Fearing an epidemic, officials round up those who have been affected and quarantine them in an empty mental hospital. This group consists of the first blind man, his wife, the doctor, the doctor's wife and three of the doctor's patients. The doctor's wife, however, for some unknown reason, hasn't lost her sight. She only pretends to do so so she can remain with her husband. As the book progresses, she not only becomes the "eyes" for the people in her group, she becomes the "eyes" for the reader as well.

As the hospital fills, it soon becomes clear that the quarantined victims weren't quarantined soon enough. The blindness is spreading like wildfire.

Inside the hospital, those afflicted have formed "groups" and each group is intent on protecting its own territory. As conditions deteriorate, so does the "humanity" of those quarantined. People steal food, others demand women be brought to them, arguments ensue and pools of urine and excrement accummulate. It's obvious that the blind have descended into more than a nightmare; they've descended into hell.

Trapped inside their luminous, white nightmare, most of the blind sink to the depths of despair and inhumanity. There are, however, a few acts of genuine kindness along the way to depravity and these few acts show the afflicted just how important "being human" really is.

BLINDNESS is a dark and chilling tale about a world that refuses to see. A world that "turns a blind eye" to the suffering and inhumanity of man. It's also a meditation (revelation, maybe) about the most primal instincts of mankind.

BLINDNESS is written in the trademark prose Saramago has made his own: The lack of punctuation (except for commas and periods), the sentences and paragraphs that go on for pages and pages. This prose seems to "fit" BLINDNESS better (at least to me) than any of Saramago's other books. The torrent of words seems to fit the rapidly deteriorating environment.

It doesn't give away anything of the plot to tell you that at the end of the book, Saramago does offer a world in chaos a ray of hope...in the form of a man who is truly blind.

BLINDNESS is a horrific book, but it is a book that is also filled with tremendous beauty. I think this is not only recommended reading for any serious reader, but reading that is required.

Rating:
Summary: You will be sticked!
Review: This book will keep you sticked to it since the very first page. Its an excellent novel, full of fear.
You will enjoy this one.

Rating:
Summary: A devastatingly honest book!
Review: This book is not for everyone. I have spoken to individuals who began reading Saramago's Blindness and could not continue--not because it was violent or gruesome--but because of the intense honesty with which is it written--an honesty that emanates naturally from the characters and the circumstances in which they find themselves. This book, fearlessly, opens up questions about basic things we take for granted. This is definitely a must read for people who have a hunger to understand what it means to be human, and are willing to pay the price to be transported into an unforgettable, and brutally honest story not written for the emotionally squeakmish.

Rating:
Summary: Even fantasy requires the plausible.
Review: Sorry, not good. I'm buoyed, though, by the thought that if the Nobel Committee can give the prize for peace to Yasser Arafat, there's no reason it can't give the prize for literature to Blindness.

It wasn't the literary contrivances that bothered me. Nameless characters aren't rare in fiction and are often useful, though here by page thirty 'the doctor's wife' became the wholly adequate substitute ' a name itself ' so hardly distracting or particularly thought provoking. The lack of punctuation was no harder to read than I assume it was to write, Why do you say that, Because I think it's true, sometimes stream of consciousness is easier to compose, Yet profound, No, easy. The obsession with fecal material was, well, obsessive.

What bothered me more was that those devices were used to mask a supreme lack of plausibility. Even fantasy requires, once premises are established, events to flow logically from one to the next, Lord of the Rings one of the perfect examples. Otherwise it's distracting, often ' here ' fatally so.

To wit: one by one people are going blind, the immediate assumption being contagion. The blind, therefore, are herded into a vacant mental hospital, there, due to the enormous fear that others would be infected, kept under threat of death by armed authorities. OK. That's not how anyone I know would react to the situation, but that's the premise, and sets up the first half of the book. The internees are treated like animals, become animals, and Calhoun's Behavioral Sink ' Behavioral Stink? ' ensues. Damned humanity!

Many weeks later everything goes dark, the hospital burns, the inmates discover the guards have finally left. They walk out to a world where everyone is already blind, where food stores are down to crumbs, where the streets are running brown from excrement, where there's been a run on the banks, where packs of people are wandering from house to house to find both shelter and food, where dogs are eating rotting corpses.

Someone please tell me: Why were the inmates still being guarded ' and still being brought food ' while all this was going on? And instead of pathological despondency, why didn't someone say Hey, you can see, let's go find the engineers so we can turn the water on? Why didn't anyone figure out if one person could see, there must be a reason? And why and why and why'

But it's often easier to bend realism to a point than suffer the inconvenience of having to amend a point to fit realism.

And the point? ''now we are all equal regarding good and evil, please don't ask me what good and evil are'what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others''

No wonder. How abundantly silly.

Saramago, perhaps, ought to get out more.

Rating:
Summary: SIMPLY A MASTERPIECE!
Review: How can you trust another human being after reading a book like Blindness? Why should you trust another one? And be disappointed? And feel rejection? And feel unloved?

BLINDNESS is a masterpiece. A moving work of unbelievable power. THE WASHINGTON POST called it "an important book, one that is unafraid to face all the horrors of the (20th) century." But, let me call it "Saramago's personal gift to humanity," and let me explain why.

Reading it is like being guided, by something, familiar but distant, unknown. Our childhood perhaps? Our inner demon? Or maybe just Saramago deliberately guiding the reader? I laughed whilst reading the "rape scene", I honestly found it hillarious. The incorporation of all the bits-and-pieces didnt break my heart, I just found it too clinical, if not comical (The technique reminded me of that now-classic and misunderstood book AMERICAN PSYCHO, and Banville's THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE, though, for obvious reason, BLINDNESS is far more important than the two mentioned works).

I found myself laughing whilst reading the "rape scene". And after that, a moment of silence. I felt disgust. Of myself. I saw myself as a bystander of an unimaginable cruelty... and I just laughed.

The 'prisoners' fighting for their food I found quite comical as well, and many more. And I wonder whether the light-hearted treatment of these scenes are deliberate. Saramago saying, "Hey, the world is full of hatred, but what are you doing about it?" You're just laughing.

This is beautiful book. We should all give our politicians this book (or such book) for Christmas.

FIVE STARS