From the sublime, humanistic The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to the intelligent, metaphysical The Cave , Saramoga challenges, warns, argues but also entertains and enlivens through the truth of his transcendent and highly cultured fictions. A little King, a little Camus, a little Gabriel Garcia: which is to say Blindness is a lot of everything. Although I found this book interesting, I didn't find it the cutting edge work of genius that I had read about. The more disturbing scenes are an intrinsic part of a tale that remind the reader of the fragility of civilisation.

An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. Sometimes you need to almost read the sentences out loud to get a feel for who is speaking (it's very fitting that the book about the blind is better perceived in a non-visual medium). Like Camus, to whom he cannot help being compared, Saramago uses the social disintegration of people in extremis as a crucible in which to study the combustion of our vices and virtues. Personajele sînt identificate astfel: soţia medicului, bătrînul cu legătură neagră, fata cu ochelari negri, orbul contabil, oarba cu insomnia, camerista, asistentul farmacist, femeia cu bricheta etc.

I actually found it incredibly effective in creating the air of blind panic that Saramago clearly wanted to impart. Any supernatural element, spirits or otherwise take a backseat to living breathing humans when it comes to perpetrating evil. A "white evil" obliterates his vision plunging him into light as fathomless and impenetrable as the darkest night. The life of the quarantine camp briskly degenerates into an existential hell where the blind are victimized first by the way they have been rounded up and shoved into what was a mental hospital, after that they are not given proper food either, and most appallingly by how they are reduced in their attempt to stay alive.

The characters are referred to by descriptive appellations such as "the doctor's wife", "the car thief", or "the first blind man". You will come away from the novel knowing you have experienced something, a grand vision of the disintegration of civilization and certainly you will reevaluate what is most important in your life. The powerful writing gives a sense of being one member of the flock, you become one of them, seeing or not seeing every action over there. He was later promoted to senior lecturer and finally Reader in Latin-American Literature in the Victoria University of Manchester until his retirement in 1995. The seeing woman steps in and uses her power to break off the horror show, but it will leave a scar on my reading inner eye forever.Whatever one’s feelings about José Saramago’s dystopian nightmare Blindness, you have to acknowledge its staying power. Glued continuously to the basques of the protagonists in their groping movements, the reader, stunned by the apocalyptic degree of the intrigue, will do so until the end.

Once the group escapes the quarantine, the old man becomes the lover of the girl with the dark glasses.He is brought to the quarantine without his mother and soon falls in with the group in the first ward.