Blindness (Harvest Book)
by Jose Saramago
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jose SaramagoTranslator: Giovanni Pontiero
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-10-04
ISBN: 0156007754
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Harvest Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780156007757
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Blindness (Harvest Book)
Book Review: Seeing but not Seeing
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the rare times I have felt compelled to write a review on Amazon!
Blindness, by the Portugese writer Jose Saramago, is, of course, about blindness. But such a literal reference from a Nobel Laureate would be cringeworthy, and, not to mention, extremely clichéd. Instead, Saramago uses blindness as a metaphor for "not seeing" and, at the same time - through his use of blindness as an inter-textual sign (whereas blindness itself is a cultural referent) - negotiates the inherently problematic nature of language and our inability to properly communicate with each other through it. Of course, the alignment of physically being able to see with intellectual or spiritual insight, apart from being logically sound, is an ancient Western idea which has long been interrogated by some of our greatest philosophers. However, in the hands of a writer like Saramago it feels as though we are considering the subject for the first time, with 'new eyes' so to speak (I couldn't resist...).
The plot is really quite simple: people start going blind mysteriously, the government freaks out, decides to `quarantine' them in a mental ward, and eventually the government itself, along with the rest of the inhabitants of the `land,' goes blind. It is significant to note that this is not about a country, but about 'a land.' Saramago deliberately refrains from giving us a specific 'sign' such as Portugal or Spain, not just, I suspect, because this is an allegory but also because Saramago is going after bigger fish. Without a specific locality, his story becomes not just universal - but (conversely) a metaphor for our inability to really 'see' a specific, broken down society.
Interestingly, for a novel depicting the complete and utter breakdown of a whole society, Saramago seems oddly preoccupied with the language he (and his characters) are using, constantly pointing out to the reader what has been said and why his character said it. Saramago is also the only writer I've read whose narratorial voice can go from an ironically objective stance to one of profound sentimentality in a single sentence. He is really quite astonishing in that sense, making it near impossible to find a clear demarcation between the story and the narrator himself. Inevitably such muddying of the waters is intentional, and along with the Woolfian paragraphing and absent quotations, it makes the reader feel 'blind' as well. We follow seven characters; none of these are named either. This further helps create a sense of 'blindness' for the reader, as nobody is signified when they speak. Because Saramago always uses this style however, it seems unlikely that he does so wholly because he wants to match form to content to make his story compelling. However it does give the story a remarkable, almost mythic quality.
So, what are we to make of all this? There is clearly a parable in here somewhere, some kernel of truth, but Saramago does not tell us what it is. One character, near the end, states unironically that "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." This is the closest we get to a literal explanation for what Saramago is doing here: consequently, we can (and should) ask the question, 'what do we not see?'
In the novel, after everyone has gone blind, institutional authority crumbles and society disintegrates to the point of seemingly no return. Sophisticates and unsophisticates alike renege to a primitive existence, concerned solely with day to day survival. The implications of an entire population gone blind are enormously vast: I couldn't possiblyd list here the number of ways in which everything falls apart, and the astonishingly rapid fall from 'civilized' to 'primitive.' Amidst all the chaos, however, people find, create or impose a set of order and togetherness simply in order to stay alive. The line between civilized and uncivilized is extremely blurry - Saramago may even be saying it simply does not exist at all. We have created enormously grand illusions about our civilized ways, but we should know by now that such civility falls by the wayside as soon as there is no one imposing it from above. So, this may be one answer to the question 'what do we not see?'
I think, however, that Saramago may also be criticizing us for not seeing the widespread disintegration of societies throughout the so-called third world (and increasingly, perhaps, in the `first world' as well). Certainly, there are innumerable places where society resembles the one presented in Blindness: adults search for food while children go hungry, and dogs eat carcasses lying around in broad daylight. Do these places not exist? Do we not know that they exist? Do we see they exist - do we really see the nature of their existence?
We can answer with a sympathetic Yes, but Saramago insists it is a resounding No. We "can see, but do not see."
Saramago is thus indicting all of us for not seeing the horrors that occur everyday in countries where, for one reason or another, society has broken down. This is not about governmental responsibility - I doubt Saramago has any faith left in government. He is asking the individual, the reader, the single autonomous being: what do you see?
I have only begun to scratch the surface of the text here. There is also the intense interrogation of "Otherness" and the problematic figure of the woman who does not go blind. I will say, however, that I don't think I have ever read a more chilling or sinuously sophisticated novel - perhaps ever. And for a seriously literary novel, it reads like a thriller. I immediately turned to page one as soon as I finished reading it the first time. Like Harold Bloom, the self-proclaimed keyholder to the Elysian Fields, I suspect that Saramago is the greatest writer alive today. He has a way with words which can only be termed wisdom, and as a reviewer notes in a blurb on the back: ' We should be grateful when it is handed to us in such generous measures.'
Summary of Blindness (Harvest Book)
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.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
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