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. ( )