Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #286 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-02
• 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

Synopsis
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.

Customer Reviews

Gripping
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
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
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.