Blindness

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.