[.ca] Blindness (ISBN 0156007754)

From Amazon.com:
In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement. In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city. Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses. And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber

La nature humaine dans toute sa laideur... et son éclat:
Une oeuvre dure, impacable même, sur la laideur de la nature humaine dans toute son horreur et son égoïsme, mais qui voit les personnages s'accrocher au plus mince espoir de survie. J'ai adoré du début à la fin.

Human Nature Exposed:
A dark look at the core of human nature and the will to survive when stripped of a sense that is widely taken for granted. The book has many literal levels that are open to interpretation and is written with very little punctuation that is sometimes difficult to follow in dialogue-heavy areas. Overall, an interesting look at the breakdown of society when laws are obsolete and where only the strong survive.

What an amazing book:
This book is simply amazing! First, it is difficult to read; there are few paragraphs, little punctuation, and no quotation marks for dialogue between characters. Rather, Saragamo jumbles it all up together. I think this was to reinforce the feeling of "blindness", just as the characters do, the reader loses his or her familiar touchstones that help you follow the story. You must read each word for it to make sense but in doing so you encounter an extremely rich and detailed tale of humanity struggling on the edge of it all. Not a casaul read by any stretch, but not to be ignored either; this book is worth the effort.

Great for book club:
Our book club chose this book recently and almost everyone in our group loved it. It is a fascinating story and character study. A very interesting read and there are several themes that can be explored in a book club discussion. It is a great look at human nature in the face of adversity. The writing style is interesting as the characters are not given names only descriptions. Almost everyone who I've recommended this book too has found it a great read. I hear they are making it into a movie starring Julianne Moore and I hope they don't screw it up as Hollywood often does.

Dark and Intriguing:
This was a book that I loved yet could not think of one person to recommend it to. It is easy to read as no characters have names, they are just known by their professions. It made me think about the human condition and how people react in strange situations. It was a good book club book as there was much to discuss after reading it. I thoroughly enjoyed it.