Blindness

Rating:
Summary: An excellent reading group selection
Review: This book is like nothing I have read before. The author takes a very thought provoking premise: people begin going blind and the blindness spreads rapidly throughout an entire society. Then the story follows the first group of people to go blind through their terrible emotional and physical challenges. Most of the things we take for granted are abandoned, for example the characters do not even use names, and an entire new way of life is created from the chaos.

Saramago has a unique writing style that takes getting used to. He uses little punctuation and paragraphs sometimes flow over several pages. But in this book where nothing is taken for granted and everything must rejustify its need, it seems to fit.

This book is not for the faint of heart, many of the scenes are graphic and harsh. But, amazingly, people also manage to rise above the squalor of their living conditions to find beauty and love. I am looking forward to my book group's discussion of Blindness. We are a diverse group of readers and I think we will enjoy exploring the many layers of this book.

Rating:
Summary: An Interesting story
Review: I enjoyed the way Saramago plays with irony in such a simple story.It is well written but on the other hand I was a bit bored.If you want to read saramago do not start with this book and if you are not a good reader don't waste your time with it.

Rating:
Summary: a chilling tale for all ages
Review: Saramago deserved the noble prize for literature -- this is a master work of the highest order. Following the poetic tradition of blindness (Homer, Milton...), Saramago invents a world in which everyone is struck down by a "white" blindness. After initial government intervention to control the epidemic, things soon detiorate. The situation becomes a Lord of the Flies mixed with Dante's Inferno. In fact, this book has much in common with Dante for its vivid smells and sounds. The reader's overwhelming sensory impression is of the stench of excrement and vomit that piles up in every corner of this fetid environment. The rape scenes are horrifying, as is much of the behavior. Yet, their remains elements of humanity and that's what makes Saramago such a brilliant writer. He sees beyond the horror and finds redeeming moments throughout. Ironically, the person who experiences the most horror is the doctor's wife who is the only person who retains her sight and is forced to witness man's inhumanity against man.

Reading this book is not always enjoyable (similar to reading about Holocaust atrocities), but it's so well written and so literary, that ultimately it attains a "classic" level that few books reach. Time will mark this a classic to be held up to Dante and Homer. Don't miss it.

Rating:
Summary: I Can't See!...
Review: A city is struck by an epidemic of 'white blindness.' The first man to succumb sits in his car, waiting for the light to change. He is taken to an eye doctor, who does not know what to make of the phenomenon -- and soon goes blind himself. The blindness spreads, sparing no one. Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards under instructions to shoot anyone trying to escape. Inside, the criminal element among the blind holds the rest captive: food rations are stolen, women are raped. The compound is set ablaze, and the blind escape into what is now a deserted city, strewn with litter and unburied corpses. The only eyewitness to this nightmare is the doctor's wife, who faked blindness in order to join her husband in the camp. She guides seven strangers through the barren streets. The bonds within this oddly anonymous group -- the doctor, the first blind man and his wife, the old man with the black eye patch, the girl with dark glasses, the boy with no mother, and the dog of tears -- are as uncanny as the surrounding chaos is harrowing. Told with compassion, humor, and lyricism, Blindness is a stunning exploration of loss and disorientation in the modern world, of man's will to survive against all odds.

Rating:
Summary: This Will Endure
Review: When it comes to giving a shock to the reader early on, no novelist can match the tactics of Jose Saramago. The Portuguese master has endless surprises up his sleeve: a whole peninsula gliding down the deep sea (THE STONE RAFT); a dead poet meting his living alter-ego in a hotel room (THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS); or a strange machine flying high in the air, powered by 'human will' (BALTASAR AND BLIMUNDA)! If these are not weird enough, Saramago has chosen to turn a whole nation blind in the novel BLINDNESS. Blindness is always a powerful literary metaphor, and in the hands of Saramago it dazzles, as he pries into its numerous connotations. In his Nobel Lecture the author proclaimed that he 'wrote BLINDNESS to remind those who might read it, that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted everyday by the powerful of the world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truth, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.'

The novel has a simple and realistic storyline. A man sitting in his car suddenly goes blind at a busy traffic inter-section. All who come in contact with the unfortunate man - the man who escorts him to his home, the eye doctor, and the patients who were with him at the clinic - lose their sights one by one. When the matter is reported to the authorities, all these blind people are huddled together and quarantined in a wretched building that was once a lunatic asylum. The eye doctor's wife, who is inexplicably spared her sight, also sneaks into the building pretending blindness. A life of untold misery is in store for them. Once the internees succeed in finding their way back to the outside world, they confront the same pandemonium and horror, as, by then, the whole nation had gone blind.

Despite its apparently simple and eventful exterior, the novel stirs up strong feelings and leaves a powerful impact in the reader's psyche. The reader can never escape from an ever-present sense of foreboding. As the story progresses, his worst fears come true, and he declares resignedly, 'these are the workings of destiny, arcane mysteries' (p 117). The brutality of the armed soldiers guarding the inmates is more disturbing than the Orwellian images. The horror that surrounds the lives of the hapless inmates and the inhabitants of the doomed city, churns up the reader's innermost feelings violently. The vividness and the scale of squalor and waste inside the building and on the streets, conjure up visions of hell. The violent scenes inside the wards, created by the blind hoodlums, confound the reader's mind. This is murkier than the heart of darkness, despite one character's likening of his condition to 'living inside a luminous halo' (p 90).

Can man's fall from grace be reversed? Saramago provides the answer in the character of the doctor's wife, the only person with her sight in tact. She is the beacon light in the middle of this melee, like a guardian angel she guides her charges through thick and thin. She epitomises human spirit, which emerges triumphant at the end. 'Here we are all guilty and innocent' (p 96) she declares and goes on to show that blindness is not just living 'in a world where all hope is gone' (p 209).

The novel proves that appearances can be deceptive in the matters of human relationships, values, morality, and our social and political systems. Behind the veneer of civilisation lurks the animal instinct of man, always ready to pounce. In the struggle for survival, all the man-made systems go down like ninepins, leaving the individuals to fend for themselves.

BLINDNESS is a brilliant piece of work, born out of Saramago's profound compassion for fellow human-beings, his intimate knowledge of the social systems and a clear understanding of human values: all bye-products of a sagacity, which very few possess. The book will definitely endure.

Rating:
Summary: I have read few books this moving
Review: After reading one of his books, I understand why Saramago won the Nobel prize. This book grabbed ahold of me and has not let me go, even three months later. The premise of blindness becomes a disturbing allegory of modern civilization where characters and places have no name. Of particular importance is the commentary on homelessness and disease. One character states that now that they are blind, no matter what they die of will have the stain of blindness - blindness and hunger, blindness and AIDS, etc. Although I talked with my wife about the novel, I could not wholeheartedly recommend her to read it because as moving as it is, the events are at times as revolting as literature can get. If you read literature to trigger emotion and thought, I can think of few novels that do that better than Blindness.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Plot, difficult prose
Review: This book is about an epidemic of blindnesss which sweeps across an unkown city, in an unknown country. The story follows a group of characters from the instant they turn blind, to their incarceration in a mental hospital, their escape ,and attempt at survival in a city where everyone has gone completely blind.

I really liked the idea of this book. The plot was interesting, offered a brilliant commentary on the human condition, and left the reader with much to think about.

The awkward prose, combined with the fact that the characters had no names, and their speech was not delineated by quotes, made this book a difficult read.

All in all I liked this book, but it could have been written in a clearer fashion

Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking, brilliant, a social commentary...
Review: The Portuguese Saramago, 1998 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, has written a serious, philosophical and intimately fascinating book that serves as a reflection of today's societies, the communities in which we live. The Boston Globe writes, "Blindness is a shattering work... a book of real stature." The book opens with an average man at the wheel of his average car, in what could be any average city in the (Western) world. He suddenly goes blind. What happens to him, those around him, the reactions of his family, government, and society in general is gripping - and, feels honest. What is so fascinating about this book is that Saramago manages to make us think without ever making the reader feel like he's in the depths of despair - it would have been easy to make this such a negative commentary - and there are occasional moments when you wonder whether the world will ever be corrected for the protagonists. I was moved and even provoked to consider the sociological and political thoughts raised by this book. I have no idea how it reads in English, but in Spanish it was a powerful novel, and one worth the time to read.

Rating:
Summary: pudo haber sido mucho mejor, pero se quedo en un thriller
Review: Esta obra, pudo haber sido mucho mejor de lo que realmente es. La historia, la trama en si es genial, una epidemia de ceguera ataca la ciudad de repente, dejando a las autoridades en confusión total para actuar y a la población a la deriva, sin rumbo fijo. En el principio se fueron utilizando diferentes sitios para almacenar a la gente mientras se encontraba una cura para la epidemia, pero pronto se vio que eso era imposible. La historia nos muestra como que tan egoísta puede llegar a ser el espíritu humano cuando se ve enfrentado a cosas que lo dejan inhabilitado para actuar. Es también la historia de la abnegación de un ser humano por sus semejantes, la esposa del doctor que jamas se separo de su grupo y de su esposo aun cuando ella estaba a salvo de la epidemia, las ignominias sufridas por todos, su salida, el extraño peregrinaje por la ciudad después de su escape del asilo...... En cuanto al estilo, es un poco difícil si uno se descuida, fácilmente se puede uno perder pero con un poco de atención todo se puede leer a la perfección.La traducción al ingles muestra varios fallos de tipo técnico, algunas palabras mal escritas o en desuso, . En verdad pienso que podría haber sido una mejor historia, pues después de la salida del asilo la odisea se vuelve un poco pesada, esta obra no le da ni por los tobillos al Evangelio según Jesucristo, una obra mucho más acabada y una traducción impecable.

LUIS MENDEZ

Rating:
Summary: BLINDNESS opens our eyes to the horrors of survival
Review: Blindness impressed me most through it's frankness and boldness -- it brought to light the level that human beings are willnig to stoop to in order to survive; doing things that would have been thought unacceptible in a civilized society. Yet, amidst these horrors and atrocities, there are moments that can touch the reader -- a woman's willingness to give up her dignity for the welfare of her mother and the sole survivor of the epidemic who dedicates every ounce of her strength to helping her group to live through the ordeal. Saramago writes in a style that i have never seen which adds to the sense of repulsion and incredulity. This is one book that i will not regret having read.