Blindness

Magical realism is accepting the impossible as a premise. José Saramago creates an inexplicable epidemic of "white blindness" which spares few in a single city. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, where they are victimized by criminals who hold everyone captive, steal food rations, and rape women. One eyewitness to this nightmare guides seven strangers through barren city streets in an uncanny procession through fearsome surroundings. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, this powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds. José Saramago… show more.

This book blew me away. As the title indicates, the root cause of society coming to its knees is spontaneous blindness. Spread like a disease, people suddenly lose their vision without indication. To qualm the spread, the first reported cases are placed together in an empty asylum, and kept caged like wild animals. As you might guess, it gets ugly in there quick, as the quarantined are left on their own, blind, as society outside slowly collapses. Jose Saramago's writing style is unmatched and wholly original. A quarter into the novel, I realized none of the main characters have names,… show more.

I remember reading this book so intently that I almost bumped into someone while I was walking down the street. One day, a sickness wafts across humanity rendering people blind wherever they are. It’s frightening to read about the characters as blindness overtakes them without warning; humans are reduced to grasping for help in the sudden darkness. And then of course there is the fact that blindness is a metaphor. A brilliant piece of literature.

Where Cat’s Cradle is a dark comedy, Blindness is just plain dark. A plague of blindness sweeps through an unnamed city in an unnamed country. The afflicted are quarantined in an abandoned asylum where all hell breaks loose. The story is told through the eyes of a woman who is inexplicably immune to the blindness, but who accompanies her husband in quarantine. She witnesses the worst of humanity, seeing everything that the inmates do when they think nobody is watching. 

José Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work, which includes this dystopian novel. Blindness is… show more.

A mere glimpse at the plot of this novel—blindness sweeps over the world in a global tsunami—should establish that it’s a fantasy. But once again, publishing labels are destiny Blindness was published as that other thing, literary fiction. Who cares? The story’s riveting. We spend nearly all our time with a self-effacing woman (“the doctor’s wife”), whose immunity to the blindness plague is as mysterious as the plague itself. As society crumbles into gang rule (the blind killing or enslaving the blind), the doctor’s wife has to choose between helping evil, dying herself, or keeping her sight an absolute secret.… show more.

One day an entire nation starts to go blind in Saramago’s unyielding narrative of human brutality amid anarchy. As in other novels by the Portuguese Nobelist, it would seem the author is writing about the Iberian peninsula—but the city descending into chaos could be Los Angeles, Lagos, or London. And like Coetzee, Saramago finds beauty in survival and unusual acts of kindness.