Blindness (Harvest Book)
by Jose Saramago
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Book Reviews of Blindness (Harvest Book)
Book Review: Sight unseen
Summary: 5 Stars
José Saramago's "Blindness" is one of the most strange and most readable novel from his body of work. The action is always moving forward, there is only one narrator ("Balthazar and Blimunda" has a couple of them), and the narrative reads like a thriller in a crescendo until it reaches an ending that makes a lot of sense in the narrative.
"Blindness" takes place in a nameless city and in an identified time. Suddenly, in the end of the second paragraph a man announces that he is blind. There is no apparent reason for the conditions and his ophthalmologist decides to study the case. But no sooner he stars his research than the doctor becomes blind himself. The government of this place decides to act and isolate all the blinds in an old facility. But that doesn't stop the blindness to be spread and contaminated the whole town.
The only person immune to the condition is the doctor's wife who never become blind, but pretend not seeing to follow and help her husband. She becomes the eyes of a group of people whose eye are no longer effective.
For Saramago, this group of people represents more than what they are. Nobody has a name, but they are identified by what would be their most important characteristic in the narrative, so we have, the doctor, the wife, the first blind, the car thief, a girl in sunglasses and so on. This device makes them something bigger than mere human beings - they are the human condition itself.
Blindness brings up the most inner - and sometimes creepiest - characteristic of each person. Killing, stealing and even raping become very easy and the primordial way of defense. Words are substituted by actions - and kindness is not very common.
Saramago is - alongside Antonio Lobo Antunes - one of the most important contemporary writers from Portugal. His prose is not easy and sometime he hasn't much hope for humanity. But in "Blindness" some light emerges from the darkness in the end. We human can survive a plague and even learn something from it - or not.
He never psychologizes his characters or their conditions. There is no explanation - and it is never important because he is working with how we deal with the unexpected and unknown, and not from what they come. In the end everything makes perfect sense and the characters are no longer the same - nor is the reader, who has seen a little more about human condition.
Book Review: Puzzling, but for no objective reason.
Summary: 3 Stars
Jose Saramago, Blindness (Harcourt Brace, 1995)Over the years since its publication, Blindness has been hailed as a modern classic and made more ten-best lists than anyone not a CPA is going to be willing to count. And I guess I can understand why, but I was far less impressed with the book than most.
To be fair, that's probably because I'm more of a stickler for grammar. It's obvious that Saramago has a distinctive style in his writing, and one that caused people to latch onto this book in amazing numbers. But a big part of that style is run-on sentences, some of which last a whole paragraph (and some paragraphs in this book last more than a page). It's maddening. I also couldn't help comparing the style of writing, and always unfavorably, to that of Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy also has a distinctive style about his prose, and it's as clipped and rhythmic as Saramago's is lengthy and free-flowing. Which a reader will prefer is likely a matter of taste; I fall on the clipped and rhythmic side of the fence.
The story is a political allegory about an unspecified modern city where the residents (at least, the ones we see throughout) have been struck blind. (One wonders if Saramago is aware of Joe Frank's 1991 radio play Rent a Family, in which Arthur Miller spins such a scenario during a monologue.) Saramago weaves with a deft hand, and the messages under the surface never get to the point of hitting the reader over the head with a hammer. This is a refreshing change from most political fiction, even if, in order to do so, Saramago spends what seems an inordinate amount of tie avoiding the political by immersing his characters in the scatological. (There is more talk of human excrement in this book than in, perhaps, anything written in the twentieth century outside medical journals and certain sexual fetish novels.) Again, this is a personal thing, but I found myself quailing at the turn of every page, wondering how many of the words would have been better printed in brown.
So many conflicts about this novel, and all of them of a personal nature. I have no choice but to give it a straight middle-of-the-road ** ½ and come back to it at a later time. There is much here to be explored, but I didn't see it as the be-all and end-all of Portugese literature that some have heralded it.
Book Review: In the Kingdom of the Blind
Summary: 4 Stars
This is the most didactic novel I have ever enjoyed. But enjoy it I did. Saramago's status as a literary giant suddenly makes sense to me, a neophyte to his work, after reading this novel. This is true even though the novel itself is flawed in many crucial ways. Namely, some of the more parabolic elements of the plot seem too transparent to be effective and that many of the more allegorical sections felt forced and uninspired (e.g. the excruciatingly obvious and heavy-handed descent of the Doctor's Wife into the basement of the grocery store as a form of katabasis). Essentially, I found that the plot seemed to make broad assumptions about the reader's inability to figure out the book's meanings (that is, the work tends to think the reader is not able to adequately sift through subtleties); Saramago, it seems, has a maddeningly smug tendency to make explicit those very topics which in a book of this type require kid gloves.
And yet, at the end of this book, I felt a surge of admiration for Saramago and for the work; despite its flaws, "Blindness" had made me a believer in Saramago's abilities. This is because, in spite of whatever difficulties I found in his handling of specific aspects of the plot, Saramago is a great story-teller and at the same time a great writer (although I'm not going as far as Harold Bloom in calling him the greatest living novelist, he is still undeniably one of the best out there). The strength of the narrative is such that it is not even constrained by his more ham-fisted moments, and indeed even forgives them: the simple tale of a city/nation struck blind is of the type in which, because of its deceptive simplicity and its propensity for maudlin turns of events, a great storyteller can be judged from a mediocre one. Additionally, the prose is some of the best I've ever read; it's full of epic, sweeping sentences that could be Proustian if not for their cynical wit and sharp edge, and that sit in a class all their own. Saramago writes sentences that could never be confused for the work of anyone his own.
In short, this book brings to light the interesting point that Saramago is a writer who is almost too good for his own work, but whose work should be appreciated all the more for that fact.
Book Review: Blindness, scary thought...
Summary: 5 Stars
"Blindness" was my second book of Saramago, the first one "The gospel according to Jesus Christ" was excellent, this time it was so much easier, I now understand better his writing style, which is so unique, no punctuations, long paragraphs among other things."Blindness", which I read in Spanish ("Ensayo sobre la ceguera") was amazing and disturbing at the same time, I could not imagine everyone going blind, it's a scary thought, I used to think while reading the book that I could no have done it or survived it. This book definitely proves that the survival human instinct is so powerful.
With everyone gone blind the world would never be the same, there's no structure anymore, no order, no hygiene, no water or electricity, in fact no nothing... The first group of blinds are quarantine in a mental institution, that is when the author explained in a shocking way the horror they were living, at this point there where times that I just could not continue reading, especially when the women were raped, Saramago detailed it in a way that I could feel their pain... In a society of blind, a group was "blessed": they had the "The doctor's wife". She miraculously was the only who could see, but sadly she said at some point that she would have prefer to be like the others, to have no sight, because of what she was seeing.
When finally they escape from the mental institution they try to find food and their houses. After "The doctor's wife" found a storage at some supermarket she managed to lead them to her apartment that thankfully hasn't been touch. After everything they've been through, finally they can bath and eat peacefully.
I wasn't surprise at all with the ending, actually it was very predictable. I highly recommend this book; it gives us a perfect view of how human beings react to extremes situations, my only complaint is that I expected some explaining of the blind epidemic, and it never happened, but in spite of that the book is excellent, it takes you in a great journey and gives you two choices; 1- you could learn to really see, there are people that see but are really blind, and 2- you could just ignore everything and live your live as if you've never read "Blindness" and continue been a blind that see.
Book Review: One of the top 3 books I read in 2007
Summary: 5 Stars
My track record with foreign Nobel laureates leaves something to be desired. Somewhere in a box in my apartment there is a book by Patrick White. I've read the first 30 pages three times. Every trip to the bookstore involves wilful ignoring of undoubtedly worthy offerings by Naguib Mahfouz and Wole Soyinka, with Orhan Pamuk joining the list of guilt triggers last year. If it weren't for my totally catholic reading tastes in college (Canetti, Sartre, Lessing, Gordimer, Grass, Hesse, Milosz), my record would be wretched indeed.
So I approached Saramago's "Blindness" with some trepidation and a slight "time to eat my vegetables" attitude. Sure, it came highly recommended by friends whose judgement I trust. But would that old Nobel jinx kick in again?
The short answer: No worries. I should have known that my friends wouldn't steer me wrong. I steamed through this book in less than 24 hours. A powerful and disturbing story, Saramago's parable draws you in and grips you. Written in a deceptively simple style, it's horrifying, but thought-provoking and completely plausible.
It has left me eager to read more of this author's work. I highly recommend it.
[SPOILER ALERT] : Discussion from here on discusses specific aspects of the plot
There are two obvious points one could take issue with - why does the doctor's wife retain her sight throughout, and the general recovery at the end. Given the overall fable-like setting - neither of these issues bothered me particularly. The first seems completely essential - this character's humanity underscores the moral bankruptcy of the fear-induced government response, but also offers a note of hope in what would otherwise be a bleak and pointless story. The ending also seems to me to be dramatically necessary, similar to the rescue at the end of "Lord of the Flies", the book that "Blindness" reminds me of most closely.
The dramatic necessity of the restoration of normality is beautifully discussed in DeQuincey's essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth":
http://www.4literature.net/Thomas_De_Quincey/On_the_Knocking_at_the_Gate_in_Macbeth/