Blindness (Harvest Book)
by Jose Saramago
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Book Reviews of Blindness (Harvest Book)
Book Review: Fine Novel, if You Can Get Past the Horrific Descriptions
Summary: 4 Stars
"Blindness" tells the story of an unexplained outbreak of blindness in an unnamed modern city, and the social confusion and devastation that follow. At first, the people who exhibit the symptoms are quarantined in increasingly dismal conditions by the government. As the contagion becomes universal, the quarantine concludes, all governmental services end, and life as we know it ceases--with the population left to wander aimlessly from building to building in search of food and shelter.
As far as the reader is told, only one person (the "doctor's wife) is ultimately spared the blindness; she serves as the narrator and moral center of the book. She, and the small group who surround her, including her husband and others they meet in quarantine, are the central characters in the novel.
The contagion brings out the uglier and/or more primitive side of the population--with the descriptions of depravity and desperation often making the book a challenge to read. For example, while in quarantine, one group wrests control of the food supply, and uses it to exact money and sex from the other detainees, including a "hard to read" rape scene. Other difficult scenes resulting from the societal breakdown describe people wandering hopelessly and aimlessly through streets filled with garbage and human excrement.
So that's the bad part. On the other side, Saramago uses this tragedy to provide many important and interesting insights into the human condition--what is the true nature of man, what it really means to "see," what is the nature of beauty, what are the rules which govern social interactions and social structures, on and on. He appears to reach some interesting conclusions, some more equivocal than the situations might otherwise suggest. Ultimately, I got the sense that the author felt that this ugliness was only temporary--transitory--and that eventually, mankind would come out the other side changed but not necessarily better or worse.
As for the mechanical elements of the novel (the language), Saramago is a rather idiosyncratic author, using some very unique methods to tell the story. For example, sentences are often lines long, devoid of punctuation, with conversations occurring with no quote marks, making it difficult to know who is speaking. Additionally, the names of the characters are never used, and instead, characters are identified throughout the book by appellation, such as "the doctor's wife" and "the first blind man." While at first I found the author's writing style annoying, I quickly accepted it, and even came to feel that his writing style fit very nicely into the tenor of the story.
All in all, I believe that this is a challenging book, with some deep insights. I would strongly recommend it, with a caution about the uglier scenes I described above.
Book Review: Frailty
Summary: 5 Stars
Jose Saramago's novel Blindness is an astounding work that deals with the frailty of humanity and society. The novel focuses on an epidemic of white blindness that sweeps across an unnamed country, quickly overtaking the entire populace. Initially, the book is set within a mental hospital in which the first victims of the blindness have been quarantined. Later, the story moves out into the city.
Ultimately, this book is about the frailty of humanity. It is also about human nature. There are terrible, horrible events within the book. There are parts that will leave you feeling sick and disgusted-appalled at the inhumanity that can, and does, exist in the world. Yet, there is also a sense of grace within the novel. This is about all of humanity, not just the bad parts. There are moments of quiet tenderness that are breathtaking and devastating-but that fill you with a great appreciation of just how incredibly kind and generous we, as humans, can be. This novel incorporates the full spectrum of what it means to be human, stripping away society to reveal the basic elements, impulses and desires of humanity.
In another sense, Blindness probes the fragility of our society. One single change that sweeps throughout the populace leads to a complete breakdown in societal systems, transforming the human race over mere days. Stripped of the ability to see, society is forced to change and adapt, moving into a survival mode that, overnight, disregards years of societal training and instruction. Furthermore, Saramago shows how certain social barriers-age, class and race, for instance-can so easily be stripped away if given the proper circumstances.
The climax is chilling and it speaks to something greater within us as humans. I don't pretend to fully grasp what it is, but I could feel it as I read. There is something about the images within the church-you'll know the scene I speak of if you read the book-that dug into my gut and took hold of me. I don't know exactly what Saramago was saying-perhaps on a second reading it would become clearer-but I know that I felt something extraordinary in the passage that spoke about the human condition. For that scene alone, the book is worth reading.
I recommend Blindness without reservation. It is terribly compelling and not that hard of a read once you settle into the style of writing. Saramago is an incredibly author and knows how to tell a fable that gets at the root of humanity. This is a book I'm going to hang on to because I'll want to read it a second time to better focus on the actions of the characters without worrying about how the story will resolve itself. If you've never read Blindness, consider buying a copy or checking it out at the library. I don't imagine you'll regret it.
Book Review: Even fantasy requires the plausible.
Summary: 2 Stars
Sorry, not good. Im buoyed, though, by the thought that if the Nobel Committee can give the prize for peace to Yasser Arafat, theres no reason it cant give the prize for literature to Blindness.It wasnt the literary contrivances that bothered me. Nameless characters arent rare in fiction and are often useful, though here by page thirty the doctors wife became the wholly adequate substitute a name itself so hardly distracting or particularly thought provoking. The lack of punctuation was no harder to read than I assume it was to write, Why do you say that, Because I think its true, sometimes stream of consciousness is easier to compose, Yet profound, No, easy. The obsession with fecal material was, well, obsessive.
What bothered me more was that those devices were used to mask a supreme lack of plausibility. Even fantasy requires, once premises are established, events to flow logically from one to the next, Lord of the Rings one of the perfect examples. Otherwise its distracting, often here fatally so.
To wit: one by one people are going blind, the immediate assumption being contagion. The blind, therefore, are herded into a vacant mental hospital, there, due to the enormous fear that others would be infected, kept under threat of death by armed authorities. OK. Thats not how anyone I know would react to the situation, but thats the premise, and sets up the first half of the book. The internees are treated like animals, become animals, and Calhouns Behavioral Sink Behavioral Stink? ensues. Damned humanity!
Many weeks later everything goes dark, the hospital burns, the inmates discover the guards have finally left. They walk out to a world where everyone is already blind, where food stores are down to crumbs, where the streets are running brown from excrement, where theres been a run on the banks, where packs of people are wandering from house to house to find both shelter and food, where dogs are eating rotting corpses.
Someone please tell me: Why were the inmates still being guarded and still being brought food while all this was going on? And instead of pathological despondency, why didnt someone say Hey, you can see, lets go find the engineers so we can turn the water on? Why didnt anyone figure out if one person could see, there must be a reason? And why and why and why
But its often easier to bend realism to a point than suffer the inconvenience of having to amend a point to fit realism.
And the point? now we are all equal regarding good and evil, please dont ask me what good and evil arewhat is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others
No wonder. How abundantly silly.
Saramago, perhaps, ought to get out more.
Book Review: A Shattered Work
Summary: 2 Stars
I read the first sixty pages of Jose Saramago's book, Blindness, borrowed from a friend. But I have to admit I am annoyed by it, and can't finish it.I hate the way Saramago mixes up his conversations between people into long sentences separated by commas. He makes it distractingly difficult to tell who said what. I suppose its all nice and nobel prizey as far as literary devices, but I find it annoying. There is some merit in this method, but worse is that the story is beriddled with elements that reveal the lack of insight of the author.
Why would everyone be left in the sanitorium to fend for themselves without help? This eighty-eight year old author has no clue about technology. If this plague had really happened there would be doctors in biohazard suites supervising the operation and entering and leaving through airlocks. They would have negative pressure containment so that no air left the buildings. None of these standard extreme precautions were taken despite the fact that people were so terrified of the disease that they would be willing to justify killing citizens leaving the building. And without doctors studying these people, how will they ever understand the disease? The whole basis of the situation is so out of touch that it is as though a child had concocted it.
But that's not all there is to Saramago's failings as a story teller. It started with the doctor going to bed with his wife after he becomes blind. It would strike any person who wasn't a moron, let alone a doctor, that he has contracted the blindness from his patient. After all, coincidence is completely not an option since this is a blindness that has never been seen before. Any doctor would have called a hospital, or the center for disease control. Instead he goes to bed, risking the health of his wife. He realizes this the next day, but that is too late for the behavior to pass as reasonable.
And for some reason Saramago has people entering the asylum decide that names mean nothing because they are blind. Everyone, without exception, starts to introduce themselves by their occupation, such as "hotel maid". Who decides they have no name because they have become blind? Is this reasonably, and uniformly, the reaction to trauma? Only an author looking for a literary device. Such obvious failures to properly depict human behaviour make it impossible for me to have any more confidence in the book.
It wouldn't be hard to rewrite this book and make it much better. I wonder if that would qualify me for a Nobel Prize for Literature? I'm sure not, but this book must surely not be one of Saramago's better works. The Boston Globe describes his book as "A shattering work by a literary master." I understand that review now: the work is shattered.
Book Review: A harrowing parable of the 20th century
Summary: 5 Stars
"Blindness" by Jose Saramago (winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature) is a harrowing parable of the 20th century, told with great depth and subtlety.
In brief, the book describes how one small group of people survive when the whole population of a city become blind, except for one woman, who becomes the eyes of her little group. The blind are initially quarantined in a disused mental institution and guarded by soldiers until they too become blind and the inmates make their escape.
While incarcerated, the blind are subject to squalor, insufficient food, murder, domination by a gang, rape and humiliation. After their escape, the sighted woman leads her little group through the city, seeking food and shelter. They encounter other blind people but no authority. The people are left to fend for themselves.
As with all great works of art, this book has layers of meaning that will reward the reflective reader long after the book is put down. Some passages have great beauty, as when the sighted woman discovers some fresh water in her unlit house (where her blind group ended up), after weeks of drinking waste water:
"We are all going to drink fresh water, I'll put our best glasses on the table. She took the lamp and went to the kitchen, she returned with the bottle, the light shone through it, it made the treasure inside sparkle. She put it on the table, went to fetch the glasses, the best they had, of finest crystal, then, slowly, as if she were performing a rite, she filled them. At last, she said, let's drink. The blind hands groped and found the glasses, they raised them trembling. Let's drink the doctor's wife said again. In the middle of the table, the lamp was like a sun surrounded by shining stars. When they had put the glasses back on the table, the girl with dark glasses and the old man with the eyepatch were crying."
The above quote may not make the same impact in isolation that it does when the reader comes upon it in the book. It moved me to tears as images of loss, of parting rites, of human hope amid despair, of light amid darkness, of group solidarity and mutual caring flooded over me. The ability to evoke cascades of imagery, which will differ for each reader, is the mark of truly great writing.
The style and language are extremely simple. The book is written as virtually a continuous narrative, with minimal punctuation, and requires some concentration. This technique forces the reader to slow down and savour the text.
I strongly recommend that you read "Seeing" by the same writer (which I have also reviewed) after reading this book. The experience of reading both books transcends either.