Blindness (Paperback)

A man stuck at traffic lights suddenly goes blind in his car. Passers-by who come to help him (or not) are soon similarly afflicted. An opthalmologist can't come up with a diagnosis, and is soon blind himself. As the contagion appears to be spread by close contact, the authorities are soon interning the sufferers at gunpoint in an abandoned lunatic asylum. After a horrifying bloodbath, the survivors break out of the asylum to discover a desecrated, almost post-nuclear city, inhabited by wandering bands of the blind...

On the face of it, Saramago goes out of his way to make things difficult for the reader: the text is virtually unpunctuated, and none of the characters are named. He also gives us frequent authorly "asides" on the action: as noted by other reviewers, it is not always clear how to take these, but they seem likely to be meant ironically rather than literally. Despite these apparent obstacles, the novel actually reads like a thriller, and the reader may well find it unputdownable (I certainly did).

As well as giving us a tale which works perfectly well on its own, what-if terms as a bit of imaginative fiction, Saramago is obviously using blindness as a metaphor for moral blindness (how we turn a blind eye to human suffering; how we take our sight, health, wealth and so on for granted; how it is only possible for us to go on by ignoring how utterly fragile we actually are). The transcendent quality of the novel comes from the final third of the book, when the doctor's wife and her motley band finally find safety and clean water, and are able to wash (the dirtiness of the blind and of their world has become another powerful metaphor). Along with other extraordinary images noted by others (the Dog of Tears; the blindfolded statues in the church), this allows Saramago to transcend the book's grimness and leave us with a powerful statement of human compassion and survival against the odds.

What strikes me most stongly about this book is the author's challenges he sets up for himself early on. As more and more characters are introduced, the challenge of keeping track of who is speaking and who is where mounts exponentially. I kept saying to myself "How's he going to do it when the wards fill up?" Saramago does not provide us with the usual narrative roadmap.

Saramogo's stylistic choices serve as a great metaphor for the subject matter. As readers, we are disoriented by the lack of accustomed punctuation, among other things. We have to pause sometimes to get our bearings. "Who said that?" we ask ourselves. It's exactly appropos to the way the blind characters react in the novel. Saramago wants the reader disoriented so that the empathy we feel for his characters becomes more pronounced. We share an awareness of what they are experiencing first-hand. We too have to grope our way in the dark, without the usual guideposts. The characters go unnamed. As one of the chracters thinks to himself,"names are of no importance here." We know them only as "the first blind man" or the "girl with dark glasses" or "the doctor's wife." Some reviewers from the US site have been put off by this device, citing "the dog of tears" as an example of Saramago's ineptitude. I would counter that this is another intentional choice on Saramago's part to maintain the purity of his allegory. Characters in true allegory are never specified by common name. Just think of Spenser's "The Fairy Queen" or Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" and you'll see what I mean. Saramago's characters operate as universal types in large part because they are nameless.

Often, Saramago provides us with stunning imagery, as in this example when the opthalmologist first discovers he is blind: "He turned to where a mirror was, and this time he did not wonder, What's going on, he did not say, There are a thousand reasons why the human brain should close down, he simply stretched out his hands to touch the glass, he knew that his image was there watching him, his image could see him, he could not see his image."

My only criticisms of the work are minor. They usually have to do with suspension of disbelief. I had to wonder why the doctor's wife didn't seize the thug's gun for instance after he was down. Also, when she entered the basement of the store, why didn't she first get a flashlight? Certainly that wouldn't have been an item that would have been hard to find under the circumstances. I also had a bit of difficulty digesting some of Saramago's homilies and folksy philosophizing, as in "her fingers brushed against the dead petals, how fragile life is when it is abandoned," or later: "...but none of us, lamps, dogs or humans, knows at the outset, why we have come into this world." Not exactly the most profound material around.

I would also differ with those who maintain that the narrative is detached or distant. Sometimes I found it obtrusive, as in the narrator's description of a statement made by the girl with dark glasses: "...surprisingly, if we consider that we are dealing with a person without much education, the girl with the dark glasses said, Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are." I would hold that this is a pretty condescending remark, intimating that a person with little formal education can come up with anything resembling profundity (which by the way, it doesn't anyway). There may be a hint of sexism creeping in here as well.

Please do not, however, let these few quibbles put you off from reading the book. It really does belong in the modern classical cannon along with Kazanzakis, the writer he most reminds me of. I have begun reading another strong entry from Senor Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (which is a title that naturally conjures up Kazanzakis' most famous work). It looks as if it may be equally interesting.