Blindness

Rating:
Summary: Is "Blindness" good, or is Portugal just a small country?
Review: "Blindness" begins with an unexplainable outbreak of, well... blindness. Some guy is just driving around in his car and all of a sudden, he can't see. There is nothing physically wrong with him, but his sight has been transformed into a milky whiteness. The lack of vision is contagious and everyone that the first blind man comes into contact with (i.e. his wife, the guy who steals his car, his optometrist, the optometrist's patients, etc) loses sight. For some reason the eye-doctor's wife never succumbs to the white-death, but I wasn't smart enough to figure this part out (I also couldn't figure out why she didn't kick ass and take over the world). Anyway, fearing and epidemic, the government tosses the contaminated untouchables into a mental hospital guarded by the military. With the blind leading the blind, all hell breaks loose in this unsupervised ecosystem and we are witness to all manners of brutal degradation, violence, and rape. Most of the story describes how a small archetypal group, lead by the doctor's wife, band together to endure these hardships while attempting to salvage their humanity. When the inmates finally realize that their guards have abandoned them, they wander out into the city to discover that everyone has suffered from the disease and society has fallen apart. Then there's this sudden ending, but I won't spoil it for you.

It doesn't take a Nobel Prizewinner in literature to realize that this whole story is one big fat allegory. In this allegory, Saramago employs blindness as a metaphor for both personal hardship and social upheaval. This much is certain. Borrowing from Camus' Plague (eh...eh... maybe college wasn't a complete waste of time!), the visionless collapse of civilization surfaces as an overbearing theme throughout the narrative. However unlike Camus' work, we are deprived of a socio-political construct to evaluate the author's meaning. As names carry no significance, the narrative identifies all the principle characters by role. Similarly there is never mention of the time period or the location. I suspect Saramago intended to express the timelessness and universality of the parable, however the absence of any anchoring philosophy leaves the allegory wide open to audience interpretation. I suppose you could say that everyone has an El Guapo. For some, shyness may be an El Guapo. For others, lack of education may be an El Guapo. But for us, El Guapo is a large ugly man who wants to kill us!

Like I said before, I may have missed something in the interpretation. Ole Jose Saramago wrote "Blindness" in Portuguese and the novel closes with a publishers note indicating that the translator died before completing his revision. Apparently, he kicked the bucket before inserting quotations marks, commas, and carriage returns. Okay, this was intentional. I'm just having some fun while gearing up for more intellectual sounding stuff. Saramago takes full advantage of his stylistic license to blend the narrative voice across characters. Maybe if I took more Lit classes, I'd appreciate that the form of the novel is designed to follow function. Sadly, I found this style aggravating because the author tends to obfuscate a definitive perspective by amalgamating his views with the players in the allegory. In essence, these one-dimensional thief, doctor, wife, whore, old man, soldier, and child roles assume the added but bewildered gravity of authorship. Saramago tends to manipulate these roles as Kafka-like puppets to the extent that, every ten or twenty pages, they become host to literary pontifications on the nature of humanity, the meaning of words, or the now beaten and bruised sight versus vision dichotomy. ..., I already read the Republic, ...! This is Plato's cave, this is Plato's cave on crack! As if this were not enough, Jose introduces a blind writer in the final act of the story. It wouldn't be so bad if the author's musings suggested broader interpretation or indicated insight, but they serve only to re-iterate the core themes of the narrative. In evaluating his reflections, I'd just like to go on the record as saying Blindness is not Gatsby and Saramago is not Fitzgerald.

So as you can probably tell, I wasn't very impressed with "Blindness". Sarmago's reluctance to commit his metaphors to a social or political context left the novel too open for me to garner any real sense of significance. While the absence of details or development detracted from my ability to empathize with the characters. If I wanted a descent into lawlessness, I'd re-read Lord of the Flies. If I wanted a breakdown of government, I'd take a spin Animal Farm. If I wanted some juicy political commentary, I'd tackle the Plague. Granted, I may be suffering from my own form of blindness (the metaphor practically writes itself) as I could have missed the entire point of this novel, but I don't think so. This is a highly praised book written by a Noble Prize winning author, yet for me it failed to say anything new that hasn't been said better before.

Rating:
Summary: No, no, no...!
Review: This can't be a Nobel Prize winner, surely? I found it to be not only boring, but revolting. Sure you turn the page, but that's it - you never get interested in the characters and you're never surprised at anything, because the story never really goes anywhere. Having read the first 200 pages or so, I wanted to finish it, but even the ending lets you down. Now I'm not saying that the book has no quality, but I have to admit that I couldn't find it...and it wasn't for a lack of trying, as I was truly expecting a great read. Perhaps I was hoping for too much.

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest books ever written
Review: Sounds like a little too much hyperbole, but I loved this book and recommend it to everyone I meet. The tough part is that since I have finished reading it, very few books even come close to its concept, pace, and meaning. A treat for any reader.

Rating:
Summary: Good for book clubs
Review: This book was disturbing, even haunting. After setting up intense conflict and unexplained horror, it resolved with an inexplicable ending that wasn't much more satisfying than, "and they all lived happily ever after." Far from my favorite book. Nonetheless, it did spark some terrific conversation at my book club; our individual interpretations of what happened in the book and what it meant were wildly divergent.

Rating:
Summary: Riveting and Engrossing...
Review: Saramango allows you to exprerience blindness through his fabulous writing .. He teases you and makes you nervous all the while making you not want to put the book down.. This is an excellent book, a must read for those who love words and their power to evoke so much feeling...

Rating:
Summary: The tale of blindness
Review: Jose Saramago discribes a world much like we enhibit today. The tale of an epidemic of blindness has swept an urban setting captures the readers imagination and brings it into a new light. The book is written without any quotations and without any names which helps to show how much we associate with sight. This novel takes something that most of us take for granted away from us. You enter a world that is all told through discription but the charactors can only sense through their remaining four senses. Saramago's originality in the format for this novel is to be applauded. The plot begins with a man suddenly loosing his eye sight and from then on everyone he enconters or who the infected people see becomes blind within several hours. This story of humanity and at times inhumanity takes the reader on a journey through times of uncertainty as a human race.

Rating:
Summary: over-rated, disapointment
Review: Blindness was recomended to me by a number of friends and readers of portuguese who said it was one of the best. However, I think the nobel prize has gotten to his head. This work, although, compelling and uses interesting punctuation to fluctuate narrative voice to character voice and etc. is simply rather cliche. I find little literary merit in this orwellian tale of atrocity. The characters are cliche, the "bad-guys" (yes there are 'bad guys) are of course gangsters, and the meat of the book arrives in the last 60 pages, when the characters leave their internment. Why are the first two hundred pages such a waste?
This story's foundation is thin. I thought moments of seeing blindness as most compelling.

Also, i find Saramago's collapsing of the filthiness and dirt of their existence (i.e. that the worse possible incarcerated existence was because they were not able to clean) as weak as his peaking moments of heterosexism and gender inequality--regardless if the main character was a women.
I found myself only reading to get through it, slow, uninteresting and terrribly disappointing

Rating:
Summary: A Nightmare-like Experience of Blindness
Review: This brilliantly written novel of Jose Saramago, a Portuguese Nobel Prize winner is harrowingly allegoric in its style and content. It evokes irony, humor and sympathy at the human condition. Saramago is one of the greatest writers of our generation with an extraordinary vision and an incredible imagination.

The story opens with a man driving his car, stopped at the traffic light, suddenly struck totally blind. Within a day those associated with him, his wife, the eye doctor and the taxi driver are all blinded. The epidemic spreads and the government in panic quarantines the victims into an abandoned mental asylum. In this crowded asylum of blind people, soon the organized systems break down and social conventions crumble, paving way to selfishness and cruelty among the internees. The 'doctor's wife' who had a pair of seeing eyes, helps to report the filth, dread, sex and violence amidst the lawless pandemonium of these wards. Eventually seven internees get away from the wards under her leadership, with the asylum burning down behind them. Soon, they realize that the entire city had gone blind. Walking through the haunted city they hunt for food and search for shelter. The total breakdown of the systems of the society eventually reduces them to living like nomads moving from one place to the other among the utter devastation of the city. The agonizing life of the blind men and women of the city with all its filth and horror thus unfolds before the reader until a few of them regain their sight and return to normal life.

The events happen in an unnamed city, in an unknown land. None of the characters are mentioned by name. The chapters of the book are neither numbered, nor named. The lengthy paragraphs of prose with minimum of punctuation and no quotation marks pose real challenge to the reader. Though these make the reading cumbersome and understanding strenuous, they help the reader to experience the gropings and stumblings of the characters in the chaotic city of the blind. No wonder, the book successfully transports one into the world of blindness sharing the emotions and feelings of the characters. This thought-provoking book should help one to discover the blindness in each one of us. It also would help one to face squarely and boldly the dread created by the confusion and disorientation of the modern civilization.

Rating:
Summary: Imagínense todos ciegos
Review: Una prosa excelente, con narrativa tal que hace imaginar al lector las situaciones, las características de cada lugar y llegar a sentir las emociones desplegadas como si fuera real.

Exteriormente lleva a la reflexión de la bendición que es tener ojos, sin embargo a profundidad con lleva a pensar y valorar nuestra realidad material y subjetiva del inmenso materialismo fatuo en el que vivimos.

Sin embargo tal cantidad de pensamientos no tiene un "final" que nos lleve a digerir tanta emoción y sorpresa. Creo que o bien es necesario un epílogo o incitar subliminalmente al lector a realizar pausas para recapacitar.

Está lleno de frases sabias que solo da la experiencia de la vida enriqueciendo y haciendo sentir que no estamos solos en este mar de emociones que guardamos celosamente

Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it down!
Review: To read this book is to become completely absorbed in a world of epidemic blindness through the eyes of one seeing character. I couldn't put it down! Gives insight into the root of human character and the societal structure we take for granted. The book evoked an emotion similar to utopian novels like 1984 or Brave New World. Highly recommended!