Blindness takes place in an unnamed city whose unnamed inhabitants are struck, one by one, with a sudden "white blindness". The first victim goes blind while sitting at an intersection, waiting for the light to change. Frightened and in shock, he is helped home by a seemingly good Samaritan who subsequently steals the newly-blind man's car before himself being struck blind. And so on and so on, the blindness spreads, until the government & mdash;in an effort to contain the apparent epidemic & mdash;rounds up the victims of this cruel plague and ships them off to a long-ago abandoned asylum. It is in this unfamiliar environment where order and decency erode to match the dilapidated, unsanitary asylum.
The motley crew of detainees includes not only the doctor who examined
the first blind man but other patients of his as well: the girl with
the dark glasses, the man with the eye patch and the boy with the
squint. Among the blind internees is also the doctor's wife, who is
somehow immune to the spreading epidemic. & She has the foresight (pun
unavoidable) to feign blindness when her husband is forced into
quarantine, an act she keeps up for the first half of the novel. As the
only sighted person in the group, she has the fortune and misfortune of
bearing witness to the horrors that take place at the asylum, evils
perpetrated in small ways by individuals upon each other (the car thief
earns a gruesome comeuppance), in absolute ways by the military guards
and in the most vile, disturbing and obscene ways by a group of thugs
who manage & mdash;mostly to the detriment of the women & mdash;to gain control of the
food supply. &
&
Saramago writes all of his novels with the same bleak, run-on sentence
style that serves the mood of this particular tale brilliantly. He
doesn't use any quotes and instead buries his dialogue into the rest of
the text, creating an effective sense of disorientation apropos to the
plot and requiring an exhaustive effort on the part of the reader. & He
uses language beautifully, many times ironically, and in some
places & mdash;without the hindrance of periods or paragraph breaks & mdash;he weaves
labyrinthine stream-of-thought.
&
Both the presentation and the content of this story were hard,
emotional work. Some days, I just couldn't make myself read. On others,
I had to put the book down and walk away as the unfolding events became
progressively more dreadful. Several times, I found myself suffering
with one eye squeezed shut, my face turned a bit from the page, feeling
a choking sense of claustrophobia and dread, a parallel universe to
that of his characters.
&
This story is one of chaos, lack of rule and humanity. But it's also
about a group of people from different backgrounds and social spheres
who become connected through the mutual experience of blindness and
captivity, powerlessness and isolation. There are religious themes
throughout this compelling novel (the doctor's wife is a Jesus-esque
figure and there is one literal-as-can-be descent into hell), yet
Saramago doesn't preach. Instead, he skillfully offers an omniscient
commentary on morality and painfully depicts the human will to survive
even the most humiliating brutalities. If you can see your way through
to the end, you will be left with much to ponder as you await the
arrival of the movie version from your Netflix que.
