Rating: 
Summary: Best Book of the 20th Century?
Review: Of the nearly 700 books I've read in the past 5 or so years this book stands out among the best of them. It was with great delight that I read it a second time. I have recommended it to many people of varying literary interests, and all those people have gone on to recommend it to their friends. The only people I would not advise reading it are those with minds too small to comprehend the vision of society that Saramago portrays, or people who are not prepared to invest a little bit of time to try the style of this book on. It is not an easy book to read (though not all that difficult), but it is all the more rewarding for that. Giovanni Pontiero's translation is a masterpiece. As truly great as all the rest of Saramago's works are, this one is my favorite (I've read several of his books a second time) and I look forward to revisiting it again. The many favorable reviews this book has been given gratify me greatly; after you've read this book you too will become hooked.
Rating:
Summary: If you liked -----, you'll love this book
Review: I hate reading reviews that say things like if you like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, then you'll love Saramago. Nonetheless, the above statement is true. I suppose the similarity in style is the most striking similarity - a style many authors have in common, true, but it is very interesting to compare these two as they are in some ways contradictory in tone. Marquez's flowering romantic undertones will not be found in Saramago as the latter is decidedly straightforward in tone leaving adjectives to the reader's imagination. The despair of Marquez's characters is high drama in comparison to those of Saramgo's in this book. If you want reality, shy away but if you are willing to accept the most absurd circumstances and the human ability to perservere.... read on! A book nearly impossible to put down.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad translation
Review: It was clear that the book had undergone a translation, the writing seemed extremly clumsy and must have lost a great deal of its original charm. I think this really spoiled what might have been an interesting story, or maybe I am more biased towards writing style than a good story.
Rating: 
Summary: A great novel
Review: After reading this book, I was shocked at how amazing someone could make a book. Jose Saramago creates a disturbing view of the world and gives the reader a million ways to interpret the underlying meanings and symbolisms, making this book a heavy thinker. Each character brings their own unique quality to the book and contributes to the story. Although it goes slowly at some parts and the conclusion was kind of weak and abrupt, the book was great.
Rating: 
Summary: The idea of this story was good.
Review: I can see why it is a good and thought-provoking book, but I find that it is not realistic enough in telling the frustrations of a suddenly blind person. It sounded easier to be inexplicably and abruptly blind than I would imagine it to be. Basically the epidemic was simplified to the extent that I thought the book was ridiculous. This story is really like a dream. What I found was not ridiculous but quite true was how uncivilized humans can be if they were being tested. A thousand years of civilization can easily be brought down in an instant.
Rating:
Summary: Not good ...
Review: Given all the rave reviews (which is partly why I read the book in the first place) I wanted to give a contrasting view. I found the style of the narative tiresome. There are not many paragraphs and you are left to work out who said what as the character's dialogues follow on from each other with little to distinguish them from each other. This you get used to. But it certainly didn't add to the reading experience. I thought there was very little humour in the book, and the sentences quite laborious. Maybe this is the fault of the translator. The idea behind the book is interesting. But I felt little really came out of it. There are glimpses of insight but this is not comprable to 1984, animal farm, or brave new world. But hey ... read it and make up your own mind.
Rating:
Summary: Our century, in parable
Review: Might as well call it the story of the human race, as we find ourselves, knowing what we know now, what the plagues and massacres of the last hundred years have taught. BLINDNESS is so wise, so beautiful, so harrowing, so visionary, that reading it is more like reading Scripture, revelation, than anything else. I have not come across the like of it. Comparisons to KING LEAR, PARADISE LOST, the poetry of Blake, are not amiss. The telling is that perfect contrivance that is no contrivance at all. No names, no dates, precious little punctuation -- like the blind men and women in the story, we must orient ourselves without the cues we take for granted, tease apart the voices in the tumult, mark each capital letter the way the blind map doors and rope-rails to keep from feeling lost. There are moments when the reader also wonders where he is; but you soon come to understand you are in the hands of a writer so controlled and deliberate that your lostness is part of the story too. I read BLINDNESS in close to one sitting, stopping only to sleep a few hours at night. It is too compelling to walk away from. Even when you have finished the last page and set it down, it will not let you be. It ought to be delivered to every doorstep, like the phone book. Almost everything you might want to know about human beings, and a good many things you might rather not, can be found inside.
Rating:
Summary: There is much to see in "Blindness"
Review: "Blindness was spreading, not like a sudden tide flooding everything and carrying all before it, but like an insidious infiltration of a thousand and one turbulent rivulets which, having slowly drenched the earth, suddenly submerge it completely." - from "Blindness" by José Saramago Look around you for a moment, take in your surroundings. Now imagine that you cannot see these words you're reading, or the page in front of you, or the people near you. Imagine, instead, that your vision has been blasted away by a field of white, as if your eyes had been immersed in a milky sea. Imagine further that the people around you, everyone else, is experiencing the same thing; their sight stripped away and replaced with only white. What would you do? How would your perceptions change? What would happen to the world around you if this came to pass? This is the world of "Blindness," José Saramago's Nobel Prize-winning novel. It begins with one man, sitting in his car, stopped at a stoplight, waiting for the light to change. Suddenly, inexplicably, he goes blind. One moment he can see, the next, he sees only white. Over the course of the next day, everyone he comes in contact with -- his wife, his eye doctor, the other patients in the waiting room, the man who helped him home (and later stole his car) -- all go blind. Then the people they contact go blind, and so it spreads, and spreads, and spreads. Despite attempts by the government to contain the blind, the blindness spreads like wildfire throughout the nameless country. In some ways, "Blindness" reminded me of the first part of Stephen King's "The Stand." In King's book, it is a deadly 'superflu' which spreads rapidly across the world, and we see some of the same traits in King's characters that we do in "Blindness," the same base pettiness in some and the same selflessness in others. However, where King chose to tell a grand tale of Armageddon and good versus evil, Saramago took a very different route, telling a very personal, intimate story of only a few of those afflicted with the "white blindness." And of course there is a dramatic difference in writing style between King and Saramago. Suffice it to say that the similarity of situation is where the similarities between "Blindness" and "The Stand" pretty much end... but it is worth noting that people who liked "The Stand" for its premise may well enjoy "Blindness." Pretty much anything by José Saramago is a challenging read, and "Blindness" is no exception. His writing style is distinctive for its long, meandering sentences and its eschewing of standard grammatical conventions for dialogue and paragraph divisions. As in the other two Saramago books I have read, page-long passages of dialogue appear without line breaks or quotation marks. In any other writer's hands, it would quickly become a muddle, but Saramago makes it work for him, and for the story. In fact, the writing is of such overall quality that it really heightens the enjoyment of the book, rather than detracting from it. Saramago creates passages of incomparable beauty and clever wit and inexpressable degradation in "Blindness," such that merit repeated readings, not because they aren't understood the first time, but just to fully appreciate them for what they are. The characters in "Blindness" are unique and unforgettable. They, like the country and city they live in, go through the entire book without proper names. They are "the girl with dark glasses" and "the doctor" and "the woman on the first floor" and "the first blind man" (meaning the first man to go blind, at the beginning of the book). Somehow, the characters not having names brings them that much closer. We cannot separate then from us, because we don't have names to do it with. "Blindness" is a very personal portrait of these characters, dealing with every aspect of their lives and how they adapt to being stricken with the white blindness. From getting food to recognizing a loved one to their sex lives to what they now have to do in the bathroom, we come to know these people very well by the time "Blindness" is over. In a perfectly-maintained circle, we come to understand the larger story only through the perceptions of these few characters, and we come to understand the people in how they react to the events of the story. The events are extraordinary, but the characters experiencing them are very, very real. When I finished "Blindness," I closed the book, put it down slowly, looked up at what was around me at that moment. It was a beautiful day. Everything looked new and perfect, like it had been there since the beginning of time and would be there until the end. The book reminded me of just how much we all come to rely on the frail apparatus by which we experience the world, these senses we have, especially sight and how important it is -- not just so we can see where we're going but so we can see the people around us, see our lover's face when we wake up and when we go to sleep, see our childrens' eyes looking at us, see a beautiful blue sky arching over clear sparkling waters. "Blindness" reminds us to look, and more than that, to see clearly all those things around us that we hold dear. For that alone, and for so much else beyond that, "Blindness" is a book to be treasured, and José Saramago is a writer to be admired. "We were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind."
Rating:
Summary: amazing
Review: this is an amazing book. it can be heavy at some times, but it is worth it. read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Surreal and Chilling
Review: I like the unique style of this book which is hard to explain until you read it. The lack of proper names though out the entire novel gives the story a surreal feel but the characters actually seem more genuine because of it. "Blindness" has a few truly horrifying scenes which are vivid and memorable even with little description and also several moments of beautiful inspiration. Your view of a simple rain shower will never be the same once you read this book. There are a number of tangents worthy of discussion but it's the chilling views of group psychology and the frailty of civilization that make this story unforgettable.
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