Blindness

1998's Nobel Prize winner for Literature, José Saramoga, has, with his astonishing and superb story Blindness, written one of the finest European novels of the last 20 or 30 years. Portugal's best-known writer--but like many Nobel winners hardly a household name in the UK--Saramoga has created a formidable and beautiful body of work deserving (and receiving) the very highest recognition. From the sublime, humanistic The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to the intelligent, metaphysical The Cave, Saramoga challenges, warns, argues but also entertains and enlivens through the truth of his transcendent and highly cultured fictions.

Suddenly, while stopped at a red light in his car, a man goes blind. A "white evil" obliterates his vision plunging him into light as fathomless and impenetrable as the darkest night. A crowd gathers and one man is kind enough to see him home. It is not long, however, before an epidemic of the new blindness causes the government to act in the most authoritarian and fearful of ways, throwing many of the recently disabled into a mental asylum, guarded by scared, trigger-happy soldiers, left to fend for themselves.

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

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Fantastic - Rated
I read this book after it was highly recommended to me by a good friend and i can honestly say it's up there with the best books I've ever read. It takes a while to get used to the writing style of different authors but with Saramago this is even more the case because of the way he avoids the use of punctuation etc. This can seem a bit confusing at times, but it does nothing but heighten the confusion felt my the blind condition of the population so it works a lot better than it sounds. There is a movie of the film due out any time soon and from the trailer I would say it's nigh-on spot on to the images the book conjured in my minds eye, which is no mean feat.

The story covers all the expected 'stuff' when society is faced with it's breakdown: filth, chaos, death, relationships, strength - ranging from sheer horror (with regards to the conditions the people have no choice but to experience) to odd moments of utter delight. But the bit that hit me like a bolt was a page towards the end: I guarantee you will never thing about a glass of water in the same way again.

Gripping - Rated
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 - Rated
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 - Rated
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.

Not quite blinding - Rated
I have to say I am rather 'blind' to the charms of this book! There are some truly harrowing scenes and enough memorable lines to support Saramago's literary status. However, his prose style tends to become a bit of a chore and buries the narrative - you come away with lots of "blind people stumbling" images and little else. To be fair, Saramago does not make many cack handed "we are all blind really!!!" allegories. I think it will reward repeated readings - do not buy it if you are after simple minded zombie style thrills!