Blindness

Una obra excelente que nos lleva a reflexionar sobre grandes vicios del ser humano ante situaciones de crisis, donde la mayoría piensa solo en sí mismo, busca compañía solo por conveniencia, pero sin buscar en realidad el bien común.
El virus de la ceguera blanca va afectando gradualmente a toda la población, pero aún no saben lo contagioso que es, por lo que se opta por segregar en condiciones insalubres a los afectados y los que han estado en contacto directo con esto. ¿Les suena a algo conocido recientemente?
La reacción inicial de los enfermos es luchar por si mismos, luego se van haciendo bandos, pero en su mayoría, nadie quiere por su propia voluntad aceptar el gobierno de una o varias personas, por lo que surge las “dictaduras” de unos pocos por el bien de los demás. ¿Les sigue sonando a algo conocido?
En medio del caos, las costumbres que rápidamente se instauran y se toman como norma, donde el poder del más fuerte es que manda, surgen los que predican sin dar soluciones, y aunque parezca paradójico, el que aún puede ver no sería aceptado, por lo que prefiere callar y preocuparse únicamente de los suyos….
Nadie tiene identidad, ni nombre, cada quien responde a una característica, pero puede ser cualquiera. ¿Qué pasará, podrán volver a ver, cómo resolverán entonces todo el caos que han ido provocando?
…”si alguna vez vuelvo a tener ojos, miraré verdaderamente a los ojos de los demás, como si estuviera viéndoles el alma”
Una excelente obra, muy recomendada su lectura.

If one can say anything about this book without spoiling some of the elements, I’d say you cannot even move past the first page, so for those paranoid, read no further!

This is an absolutely marvellous book on a seemingly rampant blindness that leave its victims in a visual sea of milky white. Saramago delves into what this blindness means on many levels, foremost individually as well as for society in large, and shows humanity from within its core in a variety of ways.

To me, this book displays humankind and the surrounding world at the base level. When stripped of sight, our senses are shocked, and then, as through cooking, reduced to display our core values.

I haven’t read Saramago prior to this novel, but I hear his way of writing is the same almost everywhere: long sentences, few punctuations and no quotation marks to show who’s saying what in dialogue. It’s very interesting, yet I think some may dislike it.

This book is brilliant and I personally think it will grow timeless.

Blindness is not too far remote from Death with Interruptions(DWI). It’s almost as if the latter is a remold of the former, a not so successful one at that might I add. The grandeur of the event, the implication of the mass, the nameless protagonists, the repercussions whether social, political, moral, economic or environmental, all of these elements figure in both novels. Not to mention the peculiar omission of dialogue punctuation which I previously whined about in DWI.

The scene in which the first blind man goes blind is helplessly stuck on my retina. Waiting there in the comfort of his car, inside the tenuous bubble of his daily routine, for the red traffic light to go green, when all of a sudden, he can no longer see. Poof, and the whole world dissolves in a white landscape. What is more disturbing than this? (a plausible answer to this may very well be the first excerpt quoted below)

This unexplained ‘white blindness’ turns out to be an epidemic that sweeps the whole country leaving no one behind, except for, this one person, who at first we thought he was no exception, but turned out to have blinded us by his bluff.

Ghastly a world of the blind turns out to be. Who could foresee that losing one physical sense would entail the loss of so many moral ones, which we, as human beings, so fervently cling to. The clash of civilization, as the book progresses, unravels to be more prominent as bigotry, greed, selfishness, rape and lust for power surface. However, not only does the human spirit reek, the streets, the shops, everything reeks with excrement and cadavers, and the description Saramago puts up is both authentic and nauseating.
Here’s an excerpt of the doctor’s wife killing the blind head-gang at the asylum:

“the scissors dug deep into the blind man’s throat, turning on themselves they struggled with the cartilage and the membranous tissues, then furiously went deeper until they came up against the cervical vertebrae. His cry was barely audible, it might have been the grunting of an animal about to ejaculate, as was happening to some of the other men, and perhaps it was, and at the same time as spurt of blood splashed on to her face, the blind woman received the discharge of semen in her mouth.”

“In truth, the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.”

If one can say anything about this book without spoiling some of the elements, I’d say you cannot even move past the first page, so for those paranoid, read no further!

This is an absolutely marvellous book on a seemingly rampant blindness that leave its victims in a visual sea of milky white. Saramago delves into what this blindness means on many levels, foremost individually as well as for society in large, and shows humanity from within its core in a variety of ways.

To me, this book displays humankind and the surrounding world at the base level. When stripped of sight, our senses are shocked, and then, as through cooking, reduced to display our core values.

I haven’t read Saramago prior to this novel, but I hear his way of writing is the same almost everywhere: long sentences, few punctuations and no quotation marks to show who’s saying what in dialogue. It’s very interesting, yet I think some may dislike it.