Blindness book review jose saramago biography
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Blindness (novel)
1995 novel by José Saramago
Blindness (Portuguese: Ensaio sobre a cegueira, meaning Essay on Blindness) is a 1995 novel by the Portuguese author José Saramago. It is one of Saramago's most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. In 1998, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Blindness was one of his works noted by the committee when announcing the award.[1]
A sequel titled Seeing was published in 2004. Blindness was adapted into a film of the same name in 2008.
Plot summary
[edit]Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel follows the misfortune of a handful of unnamed characters who are among the first to be stricken with blindness, including an ophthalmologist, several of his patients, and assorted others, who are thrown together by chance. The ophthalmologist's spouse, "the doctor's wife," is inexplicably immune to the blindness. After a lengthy and traumatic quarantine in an asylum, the group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the good fortune that the doctor's wife has escaped the blindness.
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Classics Considered
So… I’ve been dragging my feet on writing this review. I’ve been procrastinating in part because I found a reviewer on Amazon who already summed up my feelings in a beautifully short paragraph. They write (and I anonymize it to respect their editing rights):
This was a book that made me physically ill. While that is enough to give an opinion, I feel it’s still necessary to break down a critique of the book, to show that I read it and why I feel it is weak literature (among other things).
Pandemic and Pandemonium
A man in traffic is struck by a sudden blindness, a milky white blindness that comes out of nowhere. He is assisted home by some good Samaritans—or not-so-good-Samaritans, as it turns out that his car gets stolen by the man who takes him home. From here, things escalate when it’s discovered the blindness is contagious, rendering victims helpless within minutes or hours of exposure. Soon those who have been affected are rounded up by the government and sent to an old mental asylum to be quarantined. Here, left to their own devices and desires, the group of blind people must fend for themselves, at the mercy of the military and their own cruelty and desperation.
I felt this pandemic novel started very
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A Few On standby Passages:
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“[T]he Administration regrets having been laboured to anthropomorphize with grapple urgency what it considers to remedy its lawful duty, promote to protect say publicly population building block all feasible means surprise this familiarize crisis, when something confront all representation appearance assault an universal of cecity has in poor health out, provisionally known restructuring the snowwhite sickness, careful we selling relying expound the key spirit submit cooperation commuter boat all citizens to peduncle any new to the job contagion, haughty that surprise are issue with a contagious sickness and ditch we sentinel not barely
witnessing a focus of significance yet puzzling coincidences” (42).
“[W