Blindness: A novel
May. 14th, 2006 08:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylI was going to read it in December. I was going to read it last month. Now I have finally read it. It being Blindness by José Saramago.
A man is sitting in his car waiting for the lights to change. They do. His car remains where it is. He has gone blind. He is taken home to his wife by a samaritan. His wife take him to an ophthalmologist. All the people he contacts go blind. The doctor's wife remains unaffected. The government decide to quarantine the affect in an disused lunatic asylum. The conditions soon become appalling. There is starvation. People are killed for no reason. A group of gangsters take over. The inmates make difficult choices about how they are to live.
Blindness is a tour de force. It has hints of The Plague with suggestions of Lord of the Flies. It's better than both. The writing style is interesting. Saramago uses very long sentences. Some up to half a page long. He uses no quotation marks. He uses little punctuation. Only commas. The dialog seem very natural. He also uses no names. The doctor. The girl with the dark glasses. The old man with the black eyepatch. These our actors.
The subject matter is grim. There are moments of terrible horror. There are moments of great humanity. There are flashes of humour. There is the beauty of the style. This is a must read book. But one that takes courage.
A man is sitting in his car waiting for the lights to change. They do. His car remains where it is. He has gone blind. He is taken home to his wife by a samaritan. His wife take him to an ophthalmologist. All the people he contacts go blind. The doctor's wife remains unaffected. The government decide to quarantine the affect in an disused lunatic asylum. The conditions soon become appalling. There is starvation. People are killed for no reason. A group of gangsters take over. The inmates make difficult choices about how they are to live.
Blindness is a tour de force. It has hints of The Plague with suggestions of Lord of the Flies. It's better than both. The writing style is interesting. Saramago uses very long sentences. Some up to half a page long. He uses no quotation marks. He uses little punctuation. Only commas. The dialog seem very natural. He also uses no names. The doctor. The girl with the dark glasses. The old man with the black eyepatch. These our actors.
The subject matter is grim. There are moments of terrible horror. There are moments of great humanity. There are flashes of humour. There is the beauty of the style. This is a must read book. But one that takes courage.
