Product Description

A city is hit by an epidemic of sudden blindness. The authorities segregate the newly-blind and all who have come into contact with them. It is not long before the criminal element take over, the compound is set on fire and the blind escape - only to find a deserted, looted city.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2813 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-02
• Original language: Portuguese
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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

Amazon.co.uk Review
In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.

In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.

Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.

And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber

Review
An epidemic of blindness cuts throguh society, a rapidly spreading contagion without explanation or cure. The government effects total quarantine on the afflicted and interns them in a lunatic asylum under armed guard. A hellish vision is created as the quarantine fails to halt the epidemic and the interned blind fail to achieve anything like a utopia inside their overcrowded, sightless kingdom. This Nobel Prize-Winning author has conceived an outstanding scenario that reads like The Day of the Triffids written by Kafka. His unique style, ignoring punctuation, creates a fluid stream of prose, plugging the reader directly into the writer's consciousness. (Kirkus UK)

The embattled relationships among the people of a city mysteriously struck by an epidemic of blindness form the core of this superb novel by the internationally acclaimed Saramago, the Portugese author of, most recently, The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1997). A driver stalled at a busy intersection suddenly suffers an attack of "white blindness" (no other color, or any shape, is discernible). The "false Samaritan" who helps him home and then steals his car is the next victim. A busy ophthalmologist follows, then two of his patients. And on it goes, until the city's afflicted blind are "quarantined" in an unused mental ward; the guards ensuring their incarceration panic and begin to shoot; and a paternalistic "Ministry" runs out of strategies to oversee "an uprooted, exhausted world" in a state of escalating chaos. But then, as abruptly as the catastrophe began, everything changes - in a wry denouement suggesting that what we've observed (as it were) amounts to an existential test of these characters' courage and mutual tolerance. But Blindness never feels like a lesson, thanks to Saramago's mastery of plot, urbane narration (complete with irreverent criticisms of its own digressiveness), and resourceful characterizations. All the people are nameless ("the girl with the dark glasses," "the boy with the squint"), but we learn an enormous amount about them, and the central figure - the ophthalmologist's wife, who pretends to be blind in order to accompany her husband - is triumphantly employed as both viewpoint character and (as a stunning final irony confirms) "the leader of the blind." Echoes of Orwell's 1984 and images hinting at Holocaust experiences enrich the texture of a brilliant allegory that may be as revolutionary in its own way and time as were, say, The Trial and The Plague in theirs. Another masterpiece. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Survival can turn us all into barbarians
What a book! When an epidemic of sudden blindness happens, the blind and those contaminated by them are quarantined in an old asylum where they are left to fend for themselves. This situation rapidly changes from quarantine into imprisonment and squalor as the blind fumble about - they befoul the corridors as they can't find the toilets, people get injured and die from infection. The army don't deliver enough food and everyone gets gaunt and hungry. When an armed gang of blind men take over the food distribution demanding first valuables and then women in payment, you are truly horrified where before you were revolted by the conditions. I can honestly say it makes you feel dirty.

But there is one person in the asylum who can see - the eye doctor's wife - rather than leave her husband she pretends to be blind, and secretly and subtly tries to help the others around her without giving her secret away. It is through her eyes that we see everything that is going on - and it is a huge burden for her which she bears with grace and dignity.

Eventually the armed gang is overcome, and the internees realise the army outside is gone too and they escape to find a world which has rapidly become a barbarian place as the entire population is now blind. Bodies litter the streets, everyone is searching for food, there is no clean water, dogs and rats scavenge everywhere.

Later there are some marvellous scenes which relieve you temporarily from this grim vision - the cleansing powers of a shower of rain and the friendly dog who licks the tears away. An astonishing and powerful book and powerful commentary on the denial and removal of basic human rights. It was easy to read, although Saramago's largely punctuationless style takes a while to get used to. It is one that will stay with me for a long time.

thought provoking and original
I was blown away by this book. The whole thing seems like a religious allegory for the selfish modern age. Equally the plot devise of mass population blindness can also be read as the imposing of martial law on a capitalist free state. What really kept me reading though was the writing. The story deals with blindness in a frank way that doesn't shy away from exposing the worst aspects of human nature when it comes to survival in a lawless environment. The character of the doctors wife in intriguing and the symbolism inherent in her characters actions becomes increasingly apparent towards the end of the book. Read it now before the less successful film comes out,

I just don't see it.
This a good book, I just don't think it's as good as other people do. The title and the subject matter suggest a profound work and this really isn't.

The story is fairly engrossing, the characters well executed, but any intelligent insight is vague and suggestive but never conclusive. This 'blindness' doesn't work as the metaphor I suspect it is being intended as, and as such this is simply a 300 page novel about people being unable to see. Which is fairly interesting I suppose, but it say's little new about humanity facing certain challanges and drags on in the middle.

I've not read any of his other works, and I will at somepoint, but this doesn't justify the hype - I just don't see it.