Blindness

Read this along with 2 senior AP Lit classes. While I really loved discussing the book with the students, I didn't love the book. In fact I plain didn't like it, though I appreciated a good portion of the writing, even though there was some heavy-handedness at times. I definitely had to take emotional breaks when it was at peak humanity's-descent-to-hell. I'm not sure I'm ever getting that pivotal blood/semen/shit gang rape & murder scene out of my head, unfortunately.

There was no payoff for the time spent on this book intellectually, spiritually, or viscerally. I almost never say this, but I appreciated the film more because it managed to convey the same ideas without the tedium.

I understand that the writing style (run-on sentences, no separation of dialogue, no punctuation) may have been meant to give the writer the same feeling of stumbling around blindly but since it didn't truly achieve this, by the time I reached the last hundred pages I was weary of it.

I will avoid rating this for now, as I may try to read this again in a few months or a year or so. When we're not in a real-life quarantine maybe it won't feel so odious.

Blindness by Jose Saragamo is not a book that you read more than once.
It is a suffocating immersive dive into the failings of human nature. It is chaos. Blindness tells the story of an anonymous city that is stricken with a mysterious illness that blinds a majority of the population. A man is suddenly and mysteriously blinded. He yells for help, and a supposedly helpful passerby takes him home but subsequently steals his car. The man who stole the vehicle is then stricken blind. And so on, and so until chaos rolls across the land. Everyone who comes into contact with a blind person is then blinded. People are forcibly quarantined in an attempt for the government to stymy the plague. An ophthalmologist who treated the original person is stricken, and his wife, who seems to be immune to the disease, joins him in quarantine. The question is, “what is her role?” Does she tell the people around her that she is blind, or that she is sighted? What is her responsibility to the people around her? For me, that was the crux of the novel.

The asylum devolves into madness. Food and medicine become a traded commodity. Once the food runs out, there is not much left to trade but sex. Rape and violence follow. Gangs form, the worst of human nature rears its ugly head. Amongst the constant barrage of excrement that is human nature, moments of kindness periodically twinkle like stars passing behind a cloud. You want more, but Saragamo delivers only the briefest of moments to remind the reader that the soul of humanity is not all garbage, just most of it.

Life collapses, this is the new normal. The survivors make due the best that they can. New relationships form and human connections. When in crisis, it is said that you can see someone's true nature. It breaks open, and people are their true selves. We recognize that again and again in Blindness. Saragamo pulls no punches and there are few heroics in this book, just raw emotional pain.

Would I reread this, absolutely not. Hell no. Can I recognize genius when I read it? Yes, of course. Saragamo won the Nobel Award for this story. And rightfully so. It is that good, but it is not pleasant. It made me feel greasy and dirty inside. It made me question humanity and how much humanity relies on the cushion of technology. It was in its way terrifying. Do I recommend you read this? Honestly, I have no idea. This book was a deep reaming of the soul. If that is the kind of experience you want, read it. I gave it five stars because it is good, great even. But god is it an emotionally hard read.

This is the second book I've read this year (the first being Requiem for a Dream) that was written without separate paragraphs for dialogue, essentially like reading giant blocks of text for paragraphs. And again, though strange as it was to read, it flowed very well and overall I thought it was very well written. The premise of the story on the other hand isn't particularly my taste (think post-destruction-of-society trying to survive) and I found the progression of the plot to be slow and a drag to get through.

Once in a while, I am vaguely amused after finishing a book to find that the description on the back cover actually did the novel justice. In this case, someone described “Blindness” as “a magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century.” Indeed. Now, normally I am not one to shy away from the depressing. I fall more into the “bring it on” camp. Literature is about life, and life is frequently tragic. Tolstoy, happy families, blah blah. That said, SWEET JESUS. A glimmer of hope doesn't appear until the last five pages, but Saramago spent the previous 300+ pages doing a pretty damn fine job convincing me that even when there is goodness in the world, we squander it. And I'm an optimist! Retrospectively, I am glad that I read this, and appreciate the challenges that reading it entailed. However, Nobel prize be damned, I'm going to need some literary pep in my life before I attempt to digest any more of his work.

The style of this book is a little strange with no quotes or chapters and really long “sentences,” and I don't know if the author being quirky (or is it just lazy) really adds to the book. I guess it does kind of lend itself to a stream of consciousness typa writing but sometimes I need to breathe! The story itself is a pretty intriguing concept, there is some kind of “blind pandemic” with people suddenly going blind while one character retains the ability to see. It's interesting how much of a superpower a basic sense becomes when no one else has it. At times the story got um very very uncomfortable (why do the twins keep subjecting the book club to this!!) but it has lord of the flies vibes in terms of how humanity deconstructs faced with something so devastating to our standard of living and I think it was a probably realistic depiction of that deconstruction.

I didn't like how it's never explained where the blind plague came from or how it suddenly got cured?? . Like I want to know WHY and I hate when authors place characters in real world settings with some kind of fantastical/sciency twist only to use it as a plot device to examine human nature... Although I guess it could be claimed this book doesn't take place in our world since there are no names of anything at all in the book.

Overall I would say it's a good read but I would never read it again nor actively recommend it to someone else.

Wasn't a fan of his writing style at first but I came around after a few chapters. It's actually quite unsettling at times and has the effect of drawing you into the malaise of the blind characters. A great and unexpected dystopian nightmare. Would have been five stars were it not for the atrocious ending.

This book isn't scary in a traditional sense but rather scary to contemplate going through what the characters of the book do. I found the story very enjoyable, however the writing style was a little bit weird, I had switch to the audiobook version to keep everything straight. I also found some of the philosophical musings to be a bit much but otherwise I thought this was a very interesting look at an apocalyptic story. Giving it a rating of 4.5/5

Disgusting normies go feral and then do disgusting things. Terrible affirmation.

Reminder to not read fiction which makes me want to speedread. A favourite of my friend.

This doesn't challenge me or bring me to new places. This uses a pandemic as a metaphor which makes it hard to judge. This is written in simple prose. This uses blindness and explores it in a boring way which wastes the very concept, it is treated as an infliction more serious than it is as there are no side effects. There are boring rape scenes that do not bring any value to the work. I feel like I learned nothing about human nature from this, it feels like humanities flaws were intensified here, I mean at least normies have more dignity typically or let me think so. Using blindness and correlating it with being blind to issues is not tasteful and something we should move away from when writing. Perhaps for the time it was written it wasn't that bad to do that, but I don't think it aged well.

Leo eso está claro pero tampoco es el peor simplemente no me encandiló como muchos otros libros. Qué es bastante fuerte tal vez para algunas personas que es de una violación pero eso a mí no me dio como que mucho no era tan explícita eso está bien que las escenas no sean tan explícita Pero igualmente si quitamos a cenar sigue siendo un libro pesado para mí sigue siendo un libro que no no me encanta simplemente es una obligación que tenía que leerlo y tan pesado se me hizo que escuchando el audio libro se me hizo eterno insoportable y fundamente feo

I decided to read this book after one of the men in my book club told me about it. I thought the plot was extremely fascinating so I figured it was worth a read. I wasn't disappointed.

Blindess is about the sudden white-blindness a city descends into and the madness and inhumanity that follows. Only one person out of the hundreds can see, the wife of a doctor. The doctor is also one of the victims of the sudeen white blindness. It's a white blindness because the victims see nothing but white light when they go blind (as opposed to sudden blackness or darkness). There is no explanation for the sudden onset of this blindness and there appears to be no cure. One minute, you can see and the next, you can't.

The story focuses on the wife who can see, the doctor, another husband/wife couple, a young woman who wears dark glasses, an old man with an eye patch, a little boy and a dog who befriends the “seeing” wife. In the early days of the blindness, the government locks away all of the victims, hoping that the “epidemic” can be contained. Blind victims are sent to the empty mental hospital and kept there with little food, water and clean bedding. The Government has placed soldiers, with orders to kill, around the perimeter of the hospital, and those soldiers follow orders closely.

As the hospital fills with the blind, a society of terror and torture develops, when a handful of blind internees decides to horde the meager food rations and make the other blind internees pay for small portions. First the payments are made with valuables the internees brought with them, then, the payments are made with the women. The small group of men demand that the women serve as payment for the meager food supplies. The doctor's wife, devises a plan to stop the atrocities the other women in the building suffer at the hands of these men (monsters more like) and sneaks in with a group of women from another ward. She quickly kills the leader and fighting ensues, with several more men dying while the women escape the brutality of rape and humiliation. Then, the fighting goes outside, where all is still. The Government has finally fallen to the same fate as its citizens, it has gone blind.

The doctor's wife leads the group out of the hospital and manages to get them safely to the home her and her husband shared before being sent to the hospital for quarantine. She figures out ways to feed the blind group with her, all while crying into the matted fur of the dog, who met up with them as they walked the streets. Then, one day, things begin to change. Slowly, people begin to regain their sight. The sight comes on as unexpectedly as the blindness and the whole time, the doctor's wife has been the only person to witness the descent and subsequent ascent of humanity.

This book is written without names and without quotation marks. That was one thing that irritated me. I had a time figuring out who was talking as there were no quotations to show that a person was talking and when numerous characters talked, their speeches ran together and it was easy to get lost in who was talking. Other than that minor grammatical nuisance, I found this story very enjoyable and chilling. It was an excellent “what if” type of story, examining what people would become if they lost “way” and by losing the way, were given the freedom to do whatever they wanted. It showed how illness and the unexplained, can lead to fear, loathing and rash judgments by those in power. It also showed how truly powerful love is and possibly, that through blindness can we truly see who our allies and enemies are. There is a sequel to this book and I'm looking forward to reading it. It is called “Seeing” and picks up 4 years after society has regained its eyesight. This is not the kind of book that should be read quickly, but rather slowly so it can truly be absorbed. It is a good book and I really enjoyed it.