Blindness

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Sometimes the narrative overlaps so you don't know who said what, this is done is some of the parts of the book where there is a crowd. However, even as the blind spell breaks, and people are regaining their vision, the world is changed forever. Walter Mitty has nothing on Raimundo Silva, the middle-aged bachelor and proofreader in a contemporary Portuguese publishing house who's the protagonist of Saramago's dazzling postmodernist novel. The text is a block of words with few paragraph breaks or markers to help us keep track of who is talking.

Narrative viewpoints switch back and forth in what feels like quite an arbitrary manner with consequences at different times confusing and terrifying. I will finish this review with the plea in the epigraph for this thought-provoking eye-opening (no pun intended) book: "If you can see, look. Not only do his portrayals of women and their men fall short of the mark, but Saramago has clearly never had to fend for himself in the world.

The reader accompanies a group of ten people, the first victims of the scourge that will quarantine, who, in their misfortune, have the unexpected luck of having a woman who can still see among them. The lack of quotation marks around dialogue means that the speakers' identities (or the fact that dialogue is occurring) may not be immediately apparent to the reader. And the humiliation of being exploited as an object without individual value is not diminished in blindness.

The most important among nations of the last century, he in his sixties then came to prominence with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda. Some drivers have already got out of their cars, prepared to push the stranded vehicle to a spot where it will not hold up the traffic, they beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head in their direction, he is clearly shouting something, to judge by the movements of his mouth he appears to be repeating some words, not one word but three, as turns out to be the case when someone finally manages to open the door, I am blind. Subsequently, it was adapted for film and very recently for theatre showing at the Donmar Warehouse, London and starring Juliet Stevenson in their first post-lockdown piece of work. An opthamologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.

Aș mențona faptul că José Saramago a scris romanul despre „orbire” la 72-73 de ani, exemplu uimitor de fecunditate tardivă. Weaving together memories of his Portuguese childhood, Nobel Prize–winner Saramago (1922–2010) presents a lyrical portrait of the artist as a young man. I think about the room full of books that will have no more significance to me than a pile of bricks or cement blocks, something I held reverence for that is now less than useless. The government on the verge of panic rounds up all those infected in an attempt to contain the spread of the disease. Her utter lack of action and sense of responsibility for the majority of the book almost made me quit reading.

Faced with starvation, internees battle each other and burn down the asylum, only to discover that the army has abandoned the asylum, after which the protagonists join the throngs of nearly helpless blind people outside who wander the devastated city and fight one another to survive. However, they are still alive and as human as anyone could be but the society becomes oblivious to their existence.As the blindness epidemic spreads, we see the disintegration of society just like we witnessed the destruction of humanity in the quarantine area. And, since some 14,000 reviews already exist on Goodreads for this disturbing classic, I'm not going to summarize the plot, I'm not going to look up literary criticism and spit it out. I lay there in various stages of disbelief and reassurances until a sliver of light announced the dawn and my eyes, my beautiful eyes, luxuriated in those first rays of a new day.

The author avoids building characters by constantly describing them as "the doctors wife","the man with the eye patch" etc, letting your own imagination fill in the gaps,which may be a comment on corporate depersonalisation, but this was lost on me at the time of reading .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. Initial attempts to hastily quarantine the blind in an abandoned mental hospital fail to contain the spread. Gradually, she becomes “eye” to the main characters of the story as their existence become solely dependent on her will and act. The film was a good, standard, Hollywood film meaning it appeals to the masses, has pretty people and no depth and has been designed to make money.