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.”

Yum, right?
But one of my favorite excerpts from Blindness has got to be this:

“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.”

As a misanthrope, I see past the general equilibrium global society tends to have. Now what it takes to break this seemingly civilized balance can for example be a plague of blindness. Your mind’s projection of such future should not go astray from Saramago’s. And you will no doubt put to question what makes us human in the process. Daunting, to say the least.