Blindness

Product Information

Blindness" is the most captivating novel I have read in a long time, but also the one I closed with the most generous relief. fuseseră părăsite [de oameni] toate laboratoarele, unde nu le rămînea bacteriilor altă soluţie de supravieţuire decît să se devoreze între ele.

The characters are instead referred to by descriptive appellations such as "the doctor's wife", "the car thief", or "the first blind man". His translation of the Saramago work The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was awarded the Teixeira-Gomes Prize for Portuguese translation. We have had moments where our stomachs rumble or experienced a headache due to a missed meal, but true hunger, not eating for days hunger we can only speculate about what that is like.It's another contagion, where in a city people getting blind randomly starting from a traffic signal and then spreading through looking into their eyes. The wife of the eye doctor packs his suitcase and even though she can still see packs her own clothes as well. What they succeed at is immediately creating the easy "us versus them" divide between the helpless newly blind and the terrified seeing. Heard the one about the pandemic and about the bumbling, incompetent governments misguided reaction? For me there were too many miraculous occurrences in it, which kind of destroyed the credibility at times ,but all told I'd give it a thumbs up and recommend it for those with an interest in modern fiction.

In 1998, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Blindness was one of his works noted by the committee when announcing the award. 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. There is only one ‘real’ blind person, someone who was already blind even before the pandemic, but he is one of the bad guys. This writing is more akin to the wandering, rambling speech of Grandpa Simpson which, while hilarious on The Simpsons, has no place within this story.Indeed, she is the reader's guide and stand-in, the repository of human decency, the hero, if such an elaborate fable can have a hero. My main gripe is actually with the primary protagonist, the Doctor’s wife, the only one who does not lose her eyesight. Society breaks down and the characters all question long held assumptions and form new and unexpected bonds with each other. Deprived of the sense of seeing, the characters have to cope with brutal bestiality and suffering to survive in a world limited by the loss of vision - an accurate symbol for overview, control, and objective judgement of reality. So many women who have had to shoulder up and do the job of both woman and man, both mother and father.

Here we are with a bunch of people who no longer can rely on their sight so, in not giving them names, Saramago also puts us in the dark, forcing us to rely instead on personal characteristics and descriptions given to conjure these characters ourselves. Frica orbeşte, spuse tînăra cu ochelari negri, Sînt bune cuvintele, eram orbi în clipa cînd am orbit, frica ne-a orbit, frica ne va ţine orbi. I found myself caring a great deal about all the inmates in the asylum, this might be because at first they are incredibly vulnerable.

Yes, Saramago's story is a clever idea, and, yes, he creates an intentional allegory to force us to think about the nature of humanity, but his ideas are clearly those of a privileged white male in a privileged European nation. We have been brought up with the notion of blindness in which a person loses its ability to see things as they are, more often than not it reveals out empathy and compassion from us. I thought that the book is a metaphor of the people that are walking through life without thinking about the violence and cruelty that is in front of them, their ignorance of anything that could menace their civilized life. I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.

It is easier for me to lambaste a book when it is a translation; after all, maybe it is not the author who should be held accountable for the text’s flaws. You walk home and notice a discarded knit hat at the foot of a tree; you see the street cleaners’ orange signs tied to tree trunks, lampposts, telephone poles. The author avoids building characters by constantly describing them as "the doctors wife","the man with the eye patch" etc, letting your own imagination fill in the gaps,which may be a comment on corporate depersonalisation, but this was lost on me at the time of reading .

The message I took from the book is simply a reminder to appreciate the wonder of the everyday - sanitation, drinking water, plenty of varied food, feeling secure - and, above all, the gift of sight. And if they did so, then resent those who could see and instead of relying on the few sighted people for help despise them for the obvious power they have. The doctor's wife reminded me of so many women I have known who have been abandoned by their partners. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. Not at all disturbing, not at all compelling and not at all interesting, Jose Saramago's Blindness only succeeds in frustrating readers who take a moment to let their imagination beyond the page.