Suddenly everyone is going blind. We follow the first victims. None of the people are given names. The eye-doctor's wife is the only person to keep their sight. We follow them through their time in quarantine, then on their own when everyone has gone blind. It was very interesting, but I'm not sure how I feel about the end. ( )

Dieses Buch wollte ich schon lange lesen - und ich wurde nicht enttäuscht. Zunächst war es schwer, in den Erzählstil hereinzukommen, der aber wunderbar zu der Geschichte passte: Der Text wirkt wenig strukturiert, mit langen Sätzen, nicht durch Interpunktion angezeigte wörtliche Rede, Kapitelunterteilungen. Außerdem haben die Figuren keine Namen. Für mich hat aber genau das das Gefühl, in eine fremde Welt gestoßen zu sein, in der keine der früheren Regeln mehr gelten und in der man das Gefühl hat, im Chaos zu versinken, noch verstärkt.
Erschreckend realistisch finde ich den Umgang der Gesellschaft mit den Erblindeten, die in eine Art Internierungslager gesteckt werden. Allerdings steht der Umgang der Blinden untereinander dem kaum nach - die Bande, die die Versorgung kontrolliert und jede Form von Vorteil für sich herauszuschlagen versucht, ganz gleich wie widerwärtig, ist nicht weniger schockierend.

Ein sehr heftiges Buch - aber definitiv lesenswert. ( )

José Saramago's "Blindness" is a book with an interesting premise but poor execution. In an unnamed city with unnamed characters, an epidemic of "white blindness" strikes and society collapses.

The first half of the book, roughly, deals with the unnamed characters being confined to an old hospital and left to their own devices. The second half of the book deals with the anarchic world outside that hospital where people have become feral and inhumane.

The book can be difficult to read because of Saramago's use of long passages without written conventions like commas, periods, and quotation marks, like Cormac McCarthy on steroids. I'm sure there is a purpose to this, perhaps to show how breathless and quick the story is, but for me it detracts from the readability.

The book can also be difficult because of the sheer amount of inane details. Saramago uses sayings like, "as we can imagine" and "one does not need to be told" followed by a long mundane description. This does not add to the narrative but rather bogs it down.

The premise of the story is interesting and somewhat thought-provoking, but the story seems to write itself: society just falls apart and the nameless characters wander about. Perhaps this was novel in 1995, although there was plenty of dystopian fiction about anarchy before that.

José Saramago is taken almost universally as a brilliant writer. I feel like I missed something with "Blindness." ( )

A brilliant consideration of how such an endemic transmissible blindness would play out on a societal level. I think that so many of the events in this story felt salient after seeing how the COVID-19 pandemic played out. It is really impactful to consider how something such as a mass blindness can upend our morals and social structure completely. I really enjoy Saramago's writing style, and how the long sentences draw the story along as it unfolds. I think that on the whole this novel highlights important aspects of human nature, and highlights the value of community building in the face of adversity. ( )

"You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives."

A blindness epidemic breaks out, infecting almost everyone in this fictional setting and what ensues is a tumbling into anarchy. One of the things that made me think a lot from this book is the kind of panic and fear an epidemic strikes within us as human beings and how the people affected by the disease suffer because of this. You don't have to think so far back to remember such instances. The Ebola virus, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, The Aids epidemic. How fast we give the "other" status to those that suffer, isolate and stigmatise them for fear we might also get infected and suffer from the same fate, so much so that the people are called "carriers" and whatever other names given to distinguish them from "the healthy people".

The extent of human callousness and generosity is also explored, there are certain passages that are unforgettable in their horror and what's worse is the fact that these horrors of rape and violent death were/are a reality for some people. That human beings have no restraint when it comes to making life a living hell for other human beings.

This book was a heavy one, but it's the kind of book that stirs certain moral questions within us that ought to be reexamined every now and then. ( )

My second Saramago confirms my view that his whole schtick was "lit-fic for thickos". Early on in this one he drops some self-justifying b/s about why his characters don't need names, but it does nothing to alleviate the tedious agony of reading 325 pages about "the girl with the dark glasses", "the doctor's wife", "the first blind man", "the boy with the squint", etc etc:

The doctor's wife brought the glass to the boy with the squint's lips and said, Here is your water, drink slowly, slowly, and savour it, a glass of water is a marvellous thing, she was not talking to him, she was not talking to anyone, simply communicating to the world what a marvellous thing a glass of water is.

"The boy with the squint's lips" is just fugly prose. And writers who do dialogue "creatively" like that will be first against the wall when my literary revolution comes. It's especially annoying in English because of our capitalised first-person pronoun, so when a line of dialogue begins with "I", you don't know whether it's the same person speaking or someone else. Another translation issue is the lack of an English noun meaning "cego", a blind person, resulting in the clunky rendering "blind person/people" taking up ~2% of the damn book. I mean everyone is fucking blind, that's the point of the story, so I'd have just translated it as "person/people", but OK that's not Saramago's fault. What is his fault is the frequent fatuity of the narration, e.g.:

...her husband only stole cars, goods which on account of their size cannot be hidden under the bed.

On account of their size! Fascinating. And what is also his fault is the wholesale adoption of the comma splice as a cheap device to keep the eyeballs moving. It's deplorable, but it worked on me as I rushed — to hasten its end — through this vacuous book, blatantly written to draw thicko blurbs like the one on the back of mine ("a powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses — and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit") without actually saying anything at all beyond "wouldn't it be fucked up if everyone went blind".

No wonder he got a Nobel. ( )

That would be horrible, a world full of blind people, It doesn’t bear thinking about. ( )

On surface, Blindness seems to present a hypothetical scenario which focuses on a society's response to an epidemic, and that's all that I expected from it I set out to read it. However, it proved to be so much more than that. The book takes a rather slow and tame start while introducing its protagonists one by one, and as I went through the beginning, I could not even begin to anticipate the hell they would all go through.

The way Saramago tears down the facade of civilization to expose the inhumanity and inconsideration of people who have no fear of being judged, is bound to shake the reader to their core. The depiction of the effects of sudden blindness on an individual as well as the pace with which it brings the society crumbling down is incredibly realistic and scary, but through it all, this book bears a simple message: No matter how much effort has been made to strip someone of their dignity, the choice to remain human and supportive to others remains with them. Remaining steadfast and empathetc in suffering is what brings meaning to one's life, which in turn keeps them going to live another day. ( )

I read Skylight by this author years ago, which I think must be a more recent book than this one. I have never heard of the movie based on this book, so this was all new. I have also never read/watched Birdbox, but from what I've heard I wonder if this book inspired that. It's basically the apocalypse caused by sudden blindness in everyone, though it gradually spreads through the population over several days rather than all at once. Predictably everything devolves into chaos, and one woman who retains her sight for some reason bears witness to the horror. ( )

This was tedious. Some of my favorite books have similar really really bad situations in them, but those hit harder because those books have other things happen in them too. The book is written in a strange style, which I mostly liked, but the narrator was annoying and even after reading some analysis I can't see any angle that makes it better. For example there's a whole page where the book just stops its already tedious plot so it can basically just proclaim that bitches be crazy. I think that's where I really just lost trust in this book and its author, but jarring narration like that was commonplace by that point. Another huge problem is that the book ends right when it could have shown some interesting stuff. It's not one star only because there sure as hell are some impactful and tense scenes but ultimately I simply got nothing out of this book.

edit: I had to come back and change the rating to a one. This book destroyed my love of reading for a while and I'm just now getting it back and I keep remembering how bad this was and that comparison just really cements this book as a truly bad one for me. ( )

Everyone goes blind except one lady. Society falls into chaos, reminding me of "Lord of the Flies". Characters are not given names, only descriptions such as wife of first person to go blind. Author, who won Nobel Prize several years after publication of Blindness, uses very little punctuation and very long sentences. Intense descriptions of dead corpses and excrement lying around the city. ( )

Stad der blinden wauw!, Stad der zienden 1 sterretje minder. ( )

One of my favorite books, and I don't tired of recommending it.

I have seen it described as brutal, as hard to read and I have to say that might be true as the book asks "How far would a person go, when there's no one around to watch? When there's nobody to judge?" And it delivers.

But this book is as hard as gratifying. This, along with Seeing, are two of this author's best works. ( )

Abandoned during June 2021. Depressing and difficult style to get used to. Extra rough to read in a time so close to Covid.

Trying to read a bunch of books this summer and no time to waste on forcing a book that I don’t like just because others did enjoy it. (But how did they? Yikes!)

This got a little too cerebral around 75% of the way through. I get it, but it was belaboring the same points in different ways. The end was great, but I was impatient for it to be over. ( )

this was a really good book with many dark and depressing moments.there is not much of an explanation on how the blindness happens but i feel like that is what makes it more scary with the fear of the unknown. the characters are pretty good but the fact that they dont have names is a little weird but but you still remember them even without the name wish says a lot. the sad moments between characters were very well written as well.

overall a very good story that i would recommend if your in the mood for some dark content. ( )

Brutal ( )

Ooit in begonnen en weggelegd, maar doorzetten loont. De meest ongelooflijke dingen blijven gebeuren onder mensen. ( )

This was a fun novel, reminding me of Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year and Camus's The Plague, as another novel about how people act during disease outbreaks that require quarantine. It also reminded me of Janina Matthewson's Of Things Gone Astray. In Blindness, a man suddenly and inexplicably goes blind, and within a dya people he has been in contact with start going blind, as do those who had contact with those people. clearly the blindness is contagious, but the mechanism is unknown, and anyone working with the victims goes blind before they can make any progress towards understanding the condition. . The initial victims are put into quarantine in an old mental asylum, and since the soldiers guarding the facility are afraid of the contagion, the victims are forced to survive in close quarters with very little support and far too few resources. Cut off from the outside world, they also have no idea how things are developing outside, where the blindness is still spreading.
I found the total helplessness of the victims a bit overstated, though I did like that the one naturally blind man rounded up accidentally into quarantine has a huge advantage over everyone else. ( )

I feared a rather dark story and was reluctant to read this book until recently when I decided to read books of authors from around the world. This was great timing as we are currently dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Imagine that one day people around you become blind, with a sudden onset and no prior signs as they are going about their days, some while driving in traffic, others while walking, talking, sleeping, or even flying planes. A contagious blindness that spreads rapidly from one person to the other. The government, struck with fear of the unknown, hastily quarantines all of the blind and those around them in an old building and expects them to take care of themselves, no matter what happens. This is the story of these blind people, their fight for survival, and what becomes of them as they keep losing whatever they possess.

Saramago’s writing style is very strange and intriguing. Lengthy sentences, missing punctuations, characters with no names, and all conversations intertwined. Not a single name is mentioned, it is the story of the first blind man, the wife, the girl with the glasses, the doctor, the thief, and so on. Yet, this is a captivating and extremely well written story. There were some events that made me think they were in the story because this is written by a male author and no matter how advanced he writes these are his fantasies. Still, Blindness is a powerful story that leaves you with a lot to chew on. For example, how blind are we really as we go on with our daily lives, and would our vision improve if our death was imminent?
( )

Ensayo sobre la ceguera
José Saramago
Publicado: 1995 | 257 páginas
Novela Drama

Un hombre parado ante un semáforo en rojo se queda ciego súbitamente. Es el primer caso de una «ceguera blanca» que se expande de manera fulminante. Internados en cuarentena o perdidos en la ciudad, los ciegos tendrán que enfrentarse con lo que existe de más primitivo en la naturaleza humana: la voluntad de sobrevivir a cualquier precio. Ensayo sobre la ceguera es la ficción de un autor que nos alerta sobre «la responsabilidad de tener ojos cuando otros los perdieron». José Saramago traza en este libro una imagen aterradora y conmovedora de los tiempos que estamos viviendo. En un mundo así, ¿cabrá alguna esperanza? El lector conocerá una experiencia imaginativa única. En un punto donde se cruzan literatura y sabiduría, José Saramago nos obliga a parar, cerrar los ojos y ver. Recuperar la lucidez y rescatar el afecto son dos propuestas fundamentales de una novela que es, también, una reflexión sobre la ética del amor y la solidaridad.

Wavering somewhere around a 2.5, so I'm rounding to 2 for now.

Much in this book is done well. If I didn't find it as revelatory as others did, it's because the story is at heart a critique of civilization and human culture, a genre which I've already read deeply. I don't know that it's the very best allegory or the most penetrating analysis, but it's interesting, and the experience of blindness is worth reading.

That said, there are some pretty major things I could have done without:
-The writing format, the dialogue placed in line and separated by commas, Why is that, Does it add to the narrative, Is your enter key broken; the sentences that run for paragraphs, the paragraphs that run for pages, the general claustrophobia induced by never having a stopping point, a chance to breathe, no wonder there's no audiobook.
-The multiple-page rape scenes. Oh, let's just say the rape chapters.
-The narrator sniping about Women, Am I Right? He manages to absent himself from the story for the most part, but he is always, always there to remind us to judge the girl with the dark glasses, lest we forget she is a Woman Who Has Sex.

( )

2.5*
I knew before starting this book that some parts of it would be hard to take (and they were) but that is not the reason for my low rating.

First off, I didn't care for the style with which Saramago wrote in technical terms. The dialogue lacked quotation marks & was not in separate paragraphs which at times made it hard to tell who was speaking. This is picky of me, I know, & inconsistent since this style of writing hasn't bothered me in other books. But, as Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" so I am not at the moment going to try to figure out why it bothered me now but just state the fact. Less bothersome was the lack of chapter numbers because at least the writing was broken up in chapters in the way the text was laid out.

Secondly, the internment bothered me a lot. Not because of the events that occurred there (though they were gruesome enough). All the time I was reading this section, I had a strong internal resistance to the way the internment was handled. Where were the doctors? Even though blindness isn't in itself an illness, this was clearly an epidemic of something infectious. Hazmat suits or some such arrangement could have been used to protect the doctors & helpers. And the fact that the doctor's wife was immune would have been important in study of this disease. I just couldn't get myself to believe that these people had been dumped into this mental hospital without any provision for their care or even making sure that there was clean water available.

Once the story moved back to the city, I began to enjoy it more. However, the ending seemed abrupt. Overall, I prefer Camus' The Plague which covered some of the same ideas.

( )

Fans of literary fiction really shouldn't miss this work. Saramago paints a grim picture of a world where blindness spreads, like a disease, throughout a community. It starts off with a single driver who suddenly, while driving, becomes blind . . .except instead of blackness, he sees pure snowy whiteness and nothing else.

As the blindness spreads, we see authorities panic, and then ultimately the city becomes the setting for a complete and catastrophic disaster. Saragamo's follows a number of people who band together in an attempt to survive.

This book could not remind me much more of The Road, and yet it is different. The prose also uses minimal punctuation and no quotation marks. This may drive some readers crazy, but I felt it totally fit the atmosphere of the book. The prose has a run-on quality while that of The Road is spartan - - so in that regard they are dissimilar. But both touch on survival after a catastrophic event . . .and both are very raw and very graphic in their portrayal of life afterward.

Unfortunately, while I had a real appreciation for Blindness from an artistic standpoint - - I felt the book started a lot stronger than it finished. And compared to The Road (which I really couldn't avoid doing), it definitely didn't have the emotional impact.

All in all, I felt like Blindness would be a terrific read for high school and college English lit classes, and I did find it quite suspenseful; not the type of book you readily put down.

I truly thought going in that it would be a 5 star read for me - - the beginning is THAT good, but in the end, it didn't quite move me enough for me to award it that extra star. ( )

An epidemic of “white sickness,” a contagious disease that causes instant blindness, is spreading through an unidentified city. The storyline follows a group of seven unnamed people from the time they become infected through their quarantine in an asylum. They experience the difficulties of losing their sight and their freedom, as well as an increasingly chaotic social structure. A portion of the population becomes cruel abusers of power, leading to degradation of the vilest type. One person retains the ability to see and serves as a witness to the horrors of the unraveling of humanity.

Saramago’s style will not be to everyone’s taste. He writes strings of sentences separated by commas and dialogue is not separated from the descriptive narrative. His writing is intelligent, insightful, and expressive. The characters are drawn to reveal, through their actions, the many aspects of human nature. Some characters act heroically. Some become despots. Saramago shows what can happen when fear reigns supreme.

This book is an allegory relating lack of sight to ignorance and irrationality. There are many disturbing and potentially triggering scenes, and I would not recommend it for those easily upset by what they read. It reminded me a bit of Lord of the Flies with adult protagonists rather than children. I found it extremely thought-provoking and deserving of its place as a modern classic.
( )