Blindness (Harvest Book)
by Jose Saramago
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Book Reviews of Blindness (Harvest Book)
Book Review: Mayra Calvani--Midwest Book Review
Summary: 5 Stars
After reading this complex, unsettling, brilliant novel, the reader will not be surprised by the fact that its Portuguese author, Jose Saramago, won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature a short time after having written it. At its core, Blindness explores the morbid, darkest side of human nature caused by fear and the instinct for survival.
The story begins in a nameless metropolitan city when a motorist abruptly becomes blind at a red light. Instead of the usual dark blindness, this blindness is white. Another man, a stranger, helps the motorist walk to his nearby home, then goes back to the street and steals the motorist's car. At the motorist's home, the wife immediately makes an emergency appointment with an ophthalmologist, who, mystified by the oddness of the symptoms, agrees to see the blind man. However, a short time after having had contact with the motorist, the doctor also turns blind. Soon all the people who have had contact with the first blind man turn blind. Like an evil cloud, the "white sickness" begins to spread through the city. Oddly, the first blind man's wife is the only one who is not affected by this illness. The reason for this is never explained, an example of the magical realism used by Saramago. In magical realism, strange and illogical situations don't have to be explained because they serve a deeper, more complex reality.
At this point it is important to mention that the characters in this book don't have names. Instead they're referred as "the first blind man" "the wife," "the doctor," "the thief," "the girl with the dark glasses," "the boy with the squint," "the soldier," etc..
In order to prevent an epidemic, the blind are transported like cattle to a large empty asylum and promised medical care, food and supplies. In order to stay close to her husband, the wife lies about her healthy eyesight and is also sent to the asylum. It is through her eyes that the reader sees what takes place inside.
Little do the internees suspect what awaits them. Hardly any food is brought in, at least not enough for everybody. Without soaps or detergents, and as more blind are brought to the asylum, the hygienic conditions quickly become deplorable. "It was not just the fetid smell that came from the lavatories in gusts that made you want to throw up, it was also the accumulated body odour of two hundred and fifty people, whose bodies were steeped in their own sweat, who were neither able nor knew how to wash themselves, who wore clothes that got filthier by the day, who slept in beds where they had frequently defecated," writes Saramago.
Without order and a good leader, it is not long before anarchy and chaos follow. A group of "evil" blind men take control of the food and soon become the "leaders." They subject the other blind to violence, murder and rape. The victims can't call for help. Outside of the asylum soldiers keep watch, but terrified themselves with the risk of becoming blind, they shoot on the spot any blind person who dares approach the gate. As the author states, "when we are in great distress and plagued by pain and anguish that is when the animal side of our nature becomes more apparent." In fact, the inhuman way in which the soldiers treat the blind makes the reader wonder who is the real blind here.
Eventually the internees manage to escape from the asylum, only to find a grim, desolate world where absolutely everybody--except the wife--has turned blind, a world where human beings have been reduced to animals. In a scene where one of the characters eats raw meat, the reader concludes that under extreme circumstances, human beings "get used to everything in the end."
The novel is opened to interpretation. It is a metaphor of how living in a world without hope is to be blind, an allegory of how chaos and disorganisation can cloud people's minds.
Controversial themes explored in this book are how the force and nature of circumstances have considerable influence over language and behaviour, and whether the end, however "grand," ever justifies the means.
Saramago writes long paragraphs and uses no speech, exclamation or question marks. As exemplified by the following passage, the dialogue between the different characters is marked by commas and capital letters. This is a bit confusing in the beginning, but as the story unfolds the reader gets used to it: "Fine, let's go down, wait at the door while I go to find it, where did you put the keys, I don't know, he never gave them back to me, Who's he, The man who brought me home, it was a man, He must have left them somewhere, I'll have a look round, It's pointless searching, he didn't enter the flat, But the key have to be somewhere, Most likely he forgot" and so on. This writing style has a peculiar effect on the reader, especially later in the asylum. It creates a sensation of confusion. In other words, the reader somehow becomes "blind." This also makes the book seem much longer than what it really is.
The author often interrupts the story to reflect on an idea, and though this breaks the suspension of disbelief, his thoughts are always intelligent and insightful, sometimes even ironically funny.
This is a novel at times brutal, at times beautiful. There is a particular touching scene towards the end where the wife, too tired of surviving and totally hopeless, wraps her thin arms round a lost dog in the street and starts crying. Saramago refers to this dog as "the dog of tears."
Other books in the past which have dealt with similar plots and themes, and which are worth reading, are Albert Camus' The Plague and John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids.
Not an easy read but certainly a well-worth one, Blindness is a disturbing, powerful book about injustice at its worst and the horrors human beings are capable of under extreme circumstances.
Book Review: changes your perspective completely
Summary: 5 Stars
Blindness is a book about a mass epidemic of "white blindness" that overpowers all except one individual, obviously one of the main characters of the book. The story begins immediately with a nameless man (who we later come to know as "the first blind man") waiting for a traffic light to turn green. Suddenly, he is overcome with a "milky white sea", a blindness unlike anything known to man because it is white, pure. Yet, everything that happens afterwards is far from pure. The blindness spreads from this man to the whole city, and the Government of the nameless country is forced to intern everybody to avoid spreading the blindness outside of the city. The quarantine takes the main characters, whom we get to know before they get interned, to an abandoned mental hospital (an apt setting). The characters: the first blind man, his wife, the girl with the dark glasses (a prostitute), the boy without a mother, the man with the dark eyepatch, the doctor, and his wife. The doctor's wife has the only pair of seeing eyes in the city, and it is assumed possibly the only pair of seeing eyes at all.
In the mental hospital, where a good portion of the story takes place, the decent are overpowered by the delinquents, and putrefaction and decay takes the hospital by storm. dead bodies line the hallways, and the smell of the rotting mixed with excrement (blind people in a new place lack the ability to find a bathroom) is everywhere. All the while, the wife of the doctor leads the small group of seven without ever explaining (except to the doctor) that she can still see. Soon, a group of sickening men take all the food that government soldiers leave near a gate, and refuse to distribute without payment. The people pay. It only gets worse.
These men take over the wards and again refuse to distribute food without payment, but this time, the payment is sex . In desperation and out of the everlasting obligation to their husbands and children, every single woman from every single ward in the mental hospital go, knowing their fate as a rape.
This is where I stop the story- only to say that events unravel from there and the mental hospital goes up in flames, blind people fleeing into the abandoned city, which, too, is rotting. The seven characters, then joined by a dog, called the dog of tears (it licks the tears off of the wife of the doctor), are brought to levels of barbarism while trying to survive, and the rest of the city is ransacked by other blind people simply roaming around, eating dead bodies, garbage, excrement, anything they can find. The end left me nearly crying , not because it was ridiculously sad, but because it was just so disturbing and utterly confusing.
Now, aside from the brilliance of the story, it's the way Saramago actually writes it that changes your perspective. In many stories of the same caliber, it's often hard to connect with the descent of the characters and the society, and you barely feel anything close to empathy. Yet, this book is writen in stream of consciousness, meaning that Saramago writes exactly what comes to his mind (relating to the story, of course) and puts it down on paper without following grammatical conventions. Often, whole paragraphs are just one sentence continued on and on by commas. Conversation is not marked by quotes, it is simply written as if it was a sentence. For example (this isn't a real quote, but it's a very accurate portrayal of the writing style in the book):
"I am blind, I am blind, said the man, Help me, Help, Yet no one outside believed him, no one would come to his aid because they thought him a madman, I am blind, I cannot see, he continued, and finally, one man came, and in such times of need, such individuals are saving souls, Good Samaritans, What happened, I am blind, How could you go blind in an instant, I simply am, I don't know why, Where do you live, Close by, I will drive you home, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, and tears flowed out of eyes that could no longer see."
Oftentimes, while reading the book, I'd wonder "who's talking?" and I'd have to backtrack to find who- but remember, there are no names , simply descriptions. I think Saramago wanted it to be this way, because the disillusionment that stream of consciousness writing gave me the empathy and sinking feeling in my stomach, the gross, gross, disturbing feelings of being blind. I felt blind while reading the book. Imagine long passages like that about rape, so graphic, yet without punctuation, the book itself seems indifferent to the problem. It makes it ever more repulsive, and so much worse.
It may be surprising that my favorite book should be such a sad, depressing story of utter despair and confusion. To me, it's not, because I really feel that such stories have a lot to offer in terms of literary uniquness and simply philosophical meaning. There's a lot I could say about Blindness and how I think of it as a social commentary on the fragility of an increasingly insecure yet walled-up society, or possibly as a religious discourse about the blindness of God on the human plight and the the virtue of one woman, the new savior, if you will, to see the suffering of humanity (there is a really really disturbing scene in a church where the doctor's wife slowly realizes that someone has made all the paintings and idols blind by tying a white sheet over the eyes). But those things are simply thoughts that are external interpretations of a book that's fundamentally about how dependant humanity is on an ordered, structured, and regimented lifestyle.
Book Review: Blandness
Summary: 1 Stars
In an unnamed city, a man waiting in traffic suddenly and inexplicably goes blind. The doctor treating him also goes blind. Soon the contagion spreads until all known victims of this mysterious 'white blindness' are herded into an asylum, where they are brutalised by a gang of armed blindmen. Only the doctor's wife - pretending to be blind - is immune from the condition. Fire engulfs the building, and a gang of blind inmates - led by the doctor's wife - escape to a ravaged city. After a few days, the plague of blindness is inexplicably lifted.
And that's about it, really. Three unexplained phenomena govern this novel: the plague of blindness; the immunity of one character; the spontaneous and self-propagating cure. Therefore it is impossible for the author to escape the accusation that he has some explaining to do. But Saramago has a wonderful trapdoor through which he can flee. That trapdoor can be summed up in one word: "Art". And that word includes the inverted commas.
Often when a novel is described as a 'failure' it means that the author tried something that might have succeeded but just couldn't make it work for him. "Blindness", on the other hand, is an excellent idea that could easily have been made to work in so many ways but here the author did not even try. Worse, he ran away from trying. Saramago plainly wanted to attain the literary merit of having erected some great and mysterious allegory, and he was prepared to ruthlessly simplify in order to do so. Worse, the critical community (and no small part of the reading public) have gone along with this con-trick.
The prose is a grab-bag of gimmicks intended the make the novel "different" and thus mask its artistic nudity. Thus we find whole paragraphs that go on for three pages, interminable sentences within which three or four people are speaking at once; the exclusive use of commas for punctuation; and polysyndetic pile-ups such as the following:
"... all the images in the church had their eyes covered, statues with a white cloth tied around the head, paintings with a thick brushstroke of white paint, and there was a woman teaching her daughter how to read, and both had their eyes covered, and a man with an open book on which a little child was sitting, and both had their eyes covered, and another man, his body spiked with arrows, and he had his eyes covered, and a woman with a lit lamp, and she had her eyes covered, and a man with wounds on his hands and feet and his chest, and he had his eyes covered, and another man with a lion, and both had their eyes covered, and another man with a lamb, and both had their eyes covered, and another man with an eagle, and both had their eyes covered, and another man with a spear standing over a fallen man with horns and cloven feet, and both had their eyes covered, and another man carrying a set of scales, and he had his eyes covered, and an old bald man holding a white lily, and he had his eyes covered, and another old man leaning on an unsheathed sword, and he had his eyes covered ..."
[p. 300, Vintage]
There's more, of course, but I'll stop there. It's just cruel to quote at length from an author who writes like this. However, if one merely notes that the above passage is not even a sentence, but an *extract* from a sentence, one appreciates what a dreary task is facing the reader who sets out to finish this book.
Of course, a universal plague of blindness has an effect on "society". How could it not? Thus much of the commentary on this novel has consisted of predictable claptrap about the "fragility of society", the "human condition" etc. But what are we left with, in reality? "Blindness" seems to be little more that a great, inflated and unexplained metaphor - cavernous in its emptiness, and wholly unsatisfying to think about. Saramago has started with a tabula rasa, and rather than inscribing well-thought-out ideas upon it, merely left to bad readers the job of projecting profundity onto its very blankness.
Saramago is apparently a Nobel laureate, so I kept fossicking about in the text for merit. At one point I thought that perhaps the multi-comma'ed prose style - wherein it's not clear who is speaking at any one moment - might be a clever device intended to remove a layer of perception from the reader, and thus place them in the same situation as the blind characters. But then in a bookshop one day I found myself reading Saramago's "The Double", which features exactly the same prose device even though the book has nothing to do with blindness. In short, it was just shtick.
So in summary, it seems that a great idea occurred to a man who had neither the talent nor inclination to develop it. Reading someone with Saramago's lack of commitment tapping this conceit was like watching a man try to unleash the resources of a gold mine with a wooden spoon. Saramago plainly realised that to inflate his delicate plot with awkward details would be to expose the balloon to popping. Since he could not make the story flowing from the idea interesting, or even readable, he acted like the literary equivalent of a squid shooting a cloud of ink: there was a blast of "Art", followed immediately by a retreat into the opacity thereby obtained.
Book Review: Strange book; homage to Wyndham
Summary: 2 Stars
Jose Saramago's book Blindness is a rather strange book in some respects. If you are familiar with the whole "End of the World" genre then there are few real surprises here in terms of story line. Reading this book, which is anything but formulaic in style, I realized how formulaic Saramago's basic story was.
People are struck blind. First, one man sitting in traffic suddenly goes blind. Then those whom he came into contact go blind. As the epidemic of blindness spreads the blind are isolated, quarantined in a mental hospital set aside for that purpose. As the numbers of the blind increase society begins to break down -- both inside and outside of the hospital. Some of the blind form a gang to hoard the food supplies and extort valuables and sexual favors from the other blind internees. Finally, one woman, who can see but had allowed herself to be quarantined with her blind doctor husband in the hospital leads a little band out of the hospital and into the rapidly collapsing urban society. All of the people who escape with her were the first people to become stricken with the blindness. Much of this is truly formulaic. If you've read Wyndham's classic DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, or watched its poor film adaptation, or the more recent film Twenty-Eight Days, many of the descriptions of societal collapse in Saramago's book will be all too familiar.
Saramago, however, does set himself apart from previous End of the World stories with his seeming love of filth. Seriously, the descriptions of filth are endless and repetitive. Filthy hospital (shades of the Superdome after Katrina), filthy people, filthy clothes, filthy streets, etc. The filth is human excrement and we are treated to repeated mentionings and descriptions of it. Yes, the end of the world will be messy, but come on, gives us a break!
There is one way that Saramago separates himself from other End of the World authors however. I suppose he believed his style would contribute to the "blindness" quality of the book, but it seemed unnecessary and pretentious. What do I mean? There is no dialogue as such. Yes, characters talk back and forth, constantly in fact, but Saramago never once uses quotation marks, doesn't use regular sentences or paragraphs.
Here's an example:
The girl with dark glasses had approached, Do you remember me, I was wearing dark glasses, I remember you well, despite my cataract, I remember that you were very pretty, the girl smiled, Thank you, she said, and went back to her place.
New statements from the different characters are only set off with an initial letter in caps. Also, no character is ever mentioned by name. There are no names. The city is not named. The hospital is not named. The people are not named. It's all about blindness. Get it? Yeah, it's unnecessarily heavy-handed. It was annoying to constantly read: "the girl in dark glasses," "the wife of the first man" or whatever. And why would the "girl with the dark glasses" be called that when she probably stopped wearing them once she went blind?
Also, on several occasions, in the book, there were what I would call, "break-ins" which effect the narration in an unnatural way. A different narrator, different in tone, vocabularly and so forth, would pop in to stop or explicate the story. What for?
I also found the absurdity of a number of actions committed by the characters to be really just too bizarre to make sense. The girl with dark glasses, who is portrayed as a woman of low morals (much of Saramago's morality here seems off kilter one way or the other as if he is not sure if he wants the 1950's or the twentieth century), without comment allows the blind doctor to jump into bed with her. Alright that's not too much of a shocker in a novel certainly, but his wife, who is the only one who can see, stands there, watches and then tells them its okay. What? How realistic does that sound to you? The same woman, again, she's the only one who can see, has a chance to stop herself and all the other women from being repeatedly raped just to maybe get some food scraps as payment afterward. She doesn't do it (i.e. doesn't kill the chief blind rapist with his gun; couldn't she just TAKE the gun away from him since he left it on the floor?), but days or weeks later she stabs him to death with a pair of scissors, but only after many more rapes. And that act of justice isn't described as happening until the man is in the middle of abusing another woman. I ended up with very little sympathy for the supposedly heroic characters because they were often so patently stupid.
And speaking of heroes: soldiers are treated as trigger happy Neanderthals. Surprise!
The effusive samplings of praise from critics and other authors on the book jacket, when actually compared to the awkward nature of the style, make me reluctant to ever read another Saramago novel.
One last thing: the ending. (Sigh). Not only was it formulaic, but all too predicable and tedious.
Book Review: The Blind Can But Do Not See
Summary: 5 Stars
For many of us, blackouts that occur in the night can be unsettling. For those of us without automatically triggered generators, it takes a while before we can reach candles, lamps, and matches. We walk slowly as not to trip or hit our shins, we extend our arms to avoid bumping into walls or appliances. But even with candles or lamps we are quite helpless without electricity. It's not just a question of missing TV shows-we cannot read or type out work due the next day, in some areas there is no water, our refrigerated food can spoil.Now imagine if we were really blind, without the aid of electricity or fire for seeing. We have to rely on our other senses for distinction. Smell, sound, touch, and taste unlike sight can only differentiate approximately. We would find ourselves lost in oceans of the unknowable; we would be immobilized.
The condition in Blindness is much worse than that. In the book, a different kind of blindness has become a contagious sickness-a blindness where one is not submerged in darkness but in a persistent sea of white light. Everybody except for a woman has been stricken. This includes the people who regulate water pumps, who control the distribution of electricity, who man traffic lights, who sit in government, who sell food. When we find that the structures we have built our lives on are rendered useless, there is nothing to prevent disaster; we find ourselves degrading into sub-humans-into animals.
Reading the first few chapters of the book, you will find yourself gripped by the economy of words, by the lack of periods (most of which have been replaced by commas), by the lack of dialogue quotation marks, and even by block paragraphs that can go on for two to three pages. As if it was the most natural thing, you find yourself hearing the weight of the voices and even seeing the expressions of the faces of the characters who aren't even called by their names. Without noticing, you learn the patience and the attention of the blind. Reading about a world peopled by the blind, you return to what vision has relegated: you listen. And this does not need names or faces. One of the characters mentions that it is not that we have too many words but that we have too few emotions and by not using the words they express, we lose them. Later on we shall remind ourselves: to see is to listen.
The first of the blind are quarantined in a mental hospital and the horrors committed there are of the same order (or disorder) as those committed in the island of the stranded children in Lord of the Flies. In both books there is anarchy against sight. But we are not to say that atrocities are merely let loose with the collapse of order and authority. Like the eyes of the blind, what may seem clear has actually been clouded over; what may seem unthinkable has always been there. In the asylum we encounter the blindness of bureaucracy, the blindness of fear, the blindness of malice, the blindness of indifference, and the blindness of despair. They are not strangers, but in the isolation of the hospital they do more than startle-and not just at how we find others capable of them, but how we ourselves are prey. As the doctor's wife discovers: nobody is born a criminal; we only find out.
In the book we see with the eyes of the doctor's wife, the only person who was spared by the sickness. She says, "The only miracle we can perform is to go on living...to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know." She is not merely speaking of entropy or of the infinite, but of the humility of the truth of blindness-that we do not know. We do not know ourselves, we do not know people, we do not know endings. In Blindness, many maxims and proverbs emerge in conversations, like scaffoldings of knowledge whenever an event or a problem demands or enlightens. This is the way of language and the humanity of blindness (or the blindness of humanity): in it there is a dialogue of understanding. There is no final word; life is not an animal to be harnessed. That's why we talk, we tell stories, we read books.
I like the book primarily because of this. Looking back at the descriptions of the reviews before the title page-sinuous, stylistic, important, phantasmagoria, masterpiece, sophisticated, soul-wrenching, best-I can't help but cringe. For me the book is open and at the same time looks me straight into the face. In a strange way it listens while it teaches me listen.
Let us close with what the book has opened, with words from the author José Saramago: "We pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of the world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost respect due to his fellow-creatures."
And still in the words of Saramago through the doctor's wife: "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."