Blindness (Harvest Book)
by Jose Saramago
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Book Reviews of Blindness (Harvest Book)
Book Review: Sees the Day
Summary: 4 Stars
The damned human race makes for a great train wreck, and every reader is a secret rubbernecker waiting for a train wreck to happen. Enter Portugal's Jose Saramago. When it comes to good, dystopian stuff like BLINDNESS, the author knows readers will be completely drawn in once he traps hundreds of suddenly blinded people like you and me in an abandoned asylum where they can have at each other over food. And sex. And let's not overlook running water.
The basic plot is simple: one man goes mysteriously blind, then another, and another, and the shin bone's connected to the optic bone (so to speak), until an entire city is under the inexplicable sway of a terrible plague of "white darkness." People see nothing but a sea of whiteness. On this basic hook ("Why?" we wonder, and, "How?"), readers are inexorably pulled in.
This is my first Saramago, and I appreciated how he wasted little time in getting to the fun stuff. Who else to provide "fun stuff" than the government! That's right -- the powers-that-be decide to quarantine all the afflicted blind folk as well as anyone who has come into contact with them. Life in an asylum, then, only an asylum where the "lights" are always out. And the toilets don't work. And, oh yeah, where they shoot you if you try to feel your way out. It's so horrible you just have to turn the page to see if it can get horrible-er still (it can).
Man's depravity, as Saramago well knows, is as advertised. He milks it for all of its terrible worth in this gripping narrative. What threw me, however, were some smaller technical details. Like, why do the blind folk see white and not black? And why do they live in a sea of excrement (Saramago seems to relish this foul description), yet no one ever gets ill from any diseases related to poor sanitary conditions? Obviously there is symbolism left to the reader. Saramago boldly invites metaphorical speculation about the blindness, for instance, and these other issues ("white" blindness, execrable conditions) can be tackled on more figurative levels as well.
Much, too, has been made about the unorthodox sentences and punctuation in this book. A gimmick that nicely disorients readers, we come to agree -- one to make them feel at one with the novel's unfortunate victims. But I got used to it a lot faster than I ever would to blindness (I hope Saramago was not disappointed!) And finally, why is there but one person in the entire city who does NOT go blind? I expected a reason or a theory, but great expectations didn't always work out for Pip, either, and Saramago's never clear. For some, there's the charm of it. For others, there's the much clearer point of view.
All told, I found these minor distractions. I enjoyed the adventurous aspect of the story and and wanted to satisfy my morbid, page-turning curiosity in order to find out how matters would be resolved (too bad the "how" part is reserved strictly for those who can see it!). A worthy read. Four stars at least!
Book Review: Ultimately disappointing...
Summary: 1 Stars
I liked this book and found it an easy, interesting, engrossing read... until about just over half way through it. At that point, I started to lose interest, grew tired of the writing style, and began to dislike the characters and their actions. I wanted to read the book before the movie came out, but now, I'm not even sure if I want to see it.
Many positive reviewers laud over Saramago's writing technique in Blindness, as if he were writing this way to purposely bring the reader into the world of the blind. His lack of quotations, loooong, run-on sentences and endless paragraphs are not unique to this book. Quickly browse the excerpts from his other books here on Amazon and you'll see what I mean. That part of the book actually didn't bother me too much. There were some sections that were irritating and I grew tired of the repetitions of certain passages, but it was generally easy to sort through.
What did bother me (*spoilers coming*) were the actions of the characters. Why, for instance, would everyone (and I mean everyone) universally decide that they no longer needed names just because they're blind? I found that inconceivable. They didn't lose their hearing, sense of touch or smell, as well. Just from the sound of each of their voices would they be able to tell each other apart. Why would they not still need to call each other by name? Possible examples:
"Gary, could you help me go out and get some food and tramp around in all the excrement?"
"It's okay, Brian, though it seems your mom has abandoned you, even though she's just two wards down and doesn't seem to have the sense to call out for you (what with all of us giving up our names), she will be along soon".
"Alice, it's our turn to go and get gang-raped, but even though I have my vision and a large pair of sharp scissors, I'm going to go ahead and let it happen to you, myself and all of the other women here before I decide to do anything about it. And after I kill the lead bad guy, I'm just going to stand there and let one of the other blind guys grab the pistol away so that we can still be without food."
"The doctors wife" was so afraid of becoming enslaved by the other blind internees if she were to reveal that she were not blind, but ultimately her inaction cost most of them their lives through one scenario or another.
I also didn't understand how she could be so accepting of her husband sleeping with the "the girl in dark glasses".
It just all became too hard to swallow. There were too many inconceivable plot holes and scenario's. I think it all started for me with the inaction of "the doctors wife" during the gang raping and just went down hill from there. Maybe I was expecting something different of this book than what was offered. Perhaps once I get over my disappointment I'll raise my rating to two stars, as I did start out liking this book. I just finished this last night, though, so the bad taste is fresh in my mouth.
Book Review: A Book With Grand Aspirations
Summary: 4 Stars
The first thing I should mention about this book is that I am holding it up to a higher standard than that which I would hold a typical New York Times Bestseller up to. The reason for this double standard is that Blindness seems to avoid every trap that ordinarily dates your typical novel and thereby excludes that novel from the list of books that your great-grandchildren will be reading in college. In this book, no locations are given. There are no historical references, and there are no pop-culture references. In fact, there are no names in this novel. Saramago wants this story to take place everywhere and nowhere, and in no particular time period.The plot centers around a small band of people who are caught in the midst of a Kafkaesque epidemic. There is a seemingly unexplainable blindness being passed across an unnamed nation. No one knows how this 'disease' is transmitted, and no one knows if it is curable. As you might guess, panic ensues. We follow the characters through their travails, and witness the horrors that they encounter.
I don't want to say too much for fear of spoiling the book, but it is fair to say that I believe this story about blind people is really about just that... people. The book may be titled "Blindness," but this epidemic is just the means by which Saramago intends to illuminate the human condition.
My one real hang-up with this book is Saramago's penchant for authorly expositions. The third-person narrator often digresses to make trite and obvious statements about love, life, death, and just about everything else. These statements are in no way enlightening (as are the asides by authors like Fitzgerald or Conrad), and for the most part serve to remind you that the events unfolding before you are make-believe. You are only reading a book, as you are repeatedly reminded. This style may work well for the types of stories told by the postmodernists, but for this type of story, a straightforward narrative would have worked better. I had a hard time empathizing with these nameless characters because I was never fully absorbed by the story. That may also be due to the numerous two-dementional side characters who primarily serve the function of fulfulling a "type" (ie--several bad people are completely evil without a shred of goodness in them, etc.). Nonetheless, this is a fine novel and does offer a great deal to think about.
On the side, let me disagree with the many reviewers here who say that Saramago's unusual disregard for the traditional rules of grammer is distracting. It is unfortunate that so many authors get caught up in the traditions of literature, and end up worrying whether they should place the comma inside or outside the quotation marks. Saramago writes dialogue the way he wants (it is not only understandable, but I believe that it flows quite well), he writes paragraphs the way he wants, and he writes this novel the way he wants. For that, I applaud him.
Book Review: Blind, know thyself!
Summary: 5 Stars
It has already become a cliche to say that Saramago's 'Blindness' is a disturbing novel. However, that is really what it is--a disturbing novel. Why? Because it makes us ask if, indeed, we have to become blind to see the way things are and to understand what it means to be human. As one of the characters in the novel says: 'So num mundo de cegos as coisas serao o que verdadeiramente sao' ('Only in a world of blind people would things be what they truly are'). Another says: 'Dentro de nos ha una coisa que nao tem nome, essa coisa e o que somos' ('Inside us there is something that doesn't have a name, that something is what we are').More than a novel, I see 'Blindness' as a disquisition on human values. Its title in Portuguese, 'Esaio sobre a cegueira' (literally, 'Essay on blindness'), gives us a clue as to what Saramago is up to in the novel. There are terrible acts of violence and beautiful acts of solidarity; there are jokes on the way we use our language, so centered in our sense of sight; there are asides among characters, revealing, in many instances, the need for companionship and, at the same time, the ultimatately unknowable nature of everyone next to us. In many ways, 'Blindness' is reminiscent of Sartre's play 'Huis clos'. In Sartre's play, our eyes represent the hell everybody has to live with because it is through them that we base our opinions of others, particularly those next to us; in Saramago's novel, our eyes interfere with our attempts to know things and each other better because we become so easily prejudiced by the looks of things and people. One dialogue between two of the characters close to the end of the novel--the old man with a band on one of his eyes and the girl with the dark glasses--exemplify this last point beautifully.
People complain that Saramago didn't do anything new in 'Blindness'. To be sure, the story of descent into darkness and pain and the knowledge obtained from the experience has been told too many times. However, Saramago deals with the subject in a very original way in his singular writing style. After so many centuries of writing, I guess that few, if any, subjects are left untouched under the sun. The true test of a good writer is to say things with a unique, personal voice, to depart from the masses and make us see our inconsistencies and absurdities in a creative yet familiar way. Saramago has accomplished that task convincingly with 'Blindness', and he deserves to be congratulated at least for his effort.
I originally read 'Blindness' in English. This second time, I read it in Portuguese. The English translation by Giovanni Pontiero (who, unfortunately, died while completing the job) is superb, keeping the idiosyncrasies and power of Saramago's original Portuguese. English readers will be delighted with the translation, and will definitely find considerable food for thought and discussion.
Book Review: Night of the Living Blind
Summary: 5 Stars
Easily the most accessible of Saramago's novels (at least among the several I've read thus far), "Blindness" is both gripping and thought-provoking. It's also an extraordinarily difficult book to describe. Imagine "Lord of the Flies" as conceived by George Romero and written by Franz Kafka or Albert Camus--a geeky existential horror movie called "Night of the Living Blind"--and you'll get the idea. The book also frequently calls to mind "The Day of the Triffids," which also features an epidemic of blindness and which I recently read by sheer coincidence.
Like the prose style in Saramago's other works, the stream-of-consciousness sentences and their lack of punctuation and embedded dialogue might at first be off-putting to readers who would otherwise enjoy the novel. After only a few pages, however, the terrifying story and its unexpected twists will engross--and maybe even gross out--most readers. Don't let the fact that the paragraph structure looks like something out of a Virginia Woolf novel fool you: this is one of the violent and shocking "literary" novels I've read in a while.
Plot-wise, the novel has three sections: at first, an epidemic of inexplicable blindness strikes an unnamed city and the government fearfully places the victims in quarantine. Because the disease is so contagious, the "patients"--several hundred in all--are locked up without medical attention or any type of supervision, and a military cordon uses lethal force to make sure no one escapes. Only one woman retains her vision, she sneaks into the concentration camp with her husband, and she serves as the witness to the atrocities both inside and outside the prison and eventually becomes a reluctant leader. While many characters are fully described and delineated, all of them are unnamed, which only adds to the universality of the setting; although there are a scattering of specifically Portuguese/Hispanic references, it could be any city, in any nation.
In the grisly middle section of the novel, civilization and sanitation deteriorates; a repulsively crude and criminal survivalism predominates. The final section follows the adventures of a group of survivors as they attempt to make a home in a world gone mad.
But what does it all mean? Most obviously, Saramago reminds us that our society's fascination with apocalyptic scenarios and horror movies reflects many of the deepest fears about ourselves, and he depicts the extraordinarily thin line between civilization and primitivism. And it doesn't take much imagination to see that the author is describing the world not simply as it might be but as it is and has been. Perhaps most important, however, "Blindness" shows that, even under the worst imaginable indignities, some people rise above the pandemonium and persistently grasp to vestiges of decorum and justice. As in most of his works, Saramago places his bets on hope.