A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An opthamologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped.

No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order. This is not anarchy, this is blindness.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

2 Sept. 1997
Dimensions

12.9 x 2 x 19.8 cm
ISBN-10

1860466850
ISBN-13

978-1860466854
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Product description

Amazon Review

1998's Nobel Prize winner for Literature, José Saramoga, has, with his astonishing and superb story Blindness, written one of the finest European novels of the last 20 or 30 years. Portugal's best-known writer--but like many Nobel winners hardly a household name in the UK--Saramoga has created a formidable and beautiful body of work deserving (and receiving) the very highest recognition. 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.

Suddenly, while stopped at a red light in his car, a man goes blind. A "white evil" obliterates his vision plunging him into light as fathomless and impenetrable as the darkest night. A crowd gathers and one man is kind enough to see him home. It is not long, however, before an epidemic of the new blindness causes the government to act in the most authoritarian and fearful of ways, throwing many of the recently disabled into a mental asylum, guarded by scared, trigger-happy soldiers, left to fend for themselves.

While Lord of the Flies might seem an immediately similar reference, Saramaga's work has both more craft and more acuity than William Golding's tale. Blindness is a luminous piece and a wonderful starting point for readers seeking a scrupulous and wise guide to these injudicious and myopic times. --Mark Thwaite

Review

"Extraordinary...a tour de force of thought-experiment and feeling-experiment" (Observer)

"This is a shattering work by a literary master...a book of real stature" (Boston Globe)

"Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet" (Independent)

"He writes a prose of particularly luminous intensity, brilliantly rendered into English by his regular translator Giovanni Pontiero... Sweepingly ambitious" (The Times)

"A powerful fable" (Scotsman)

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; New edition (2 Sept. 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1860466850
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1860466854
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 2 x 19.8 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 432,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 40,360 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- 51,092 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)

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2 star		5%
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Paul Phillips

A thought-provoking allegory that's also a page-turner.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 March 2017

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A good friend suggested that this would be a topical read, as the social stability we've always taken for granted has started to look horribly fragile lately. However, I must confess that the first page, with its unsettling lack of establishing viewpoint and its deliberately odd punctuation, had me thinking that I'd be struggling through a 'worthy but difficult' allegory.

I needn't have worried. Yes, it's a thought-provoking allegory, but it's also a page-turner. The style plunges you into the heads - and the terrifying predicament - of the protagonists. The lack of familiar punctuation to give shape to the sentences and the dialogue, like the lack of names for the characters, is all part of an immersive experience that leaves you, like them, groping around the story, trying to get your bearings, fearful of what you're not seeing and what you're about to stumble onto. And it works. It's like having an intelligent conversation while binge-watching The Walking Dead.

18 people found this helpful

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Unsettling and bleak

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 December 2018

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The only other book I’ve read by the author is, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ so I really didn’t know what to expect with Blindness. The two books are very different. I like different. Blindness reminded me a lot of the works of John Wyndham especially his disturbing novel, The Day of the Triffids. I really enjoyed it. I can’t think of anything more terrifying than suddenly, inexplicably losing my sight. Saramago does an amazing job of conveying the terror of those who have lost their sight and describing the gradual decline of society as more and more people lose their sight and chaos descends. Blindness is a dark and intense book at times. I thought it was great. I want to read more of Saramago’swork.

7 people found this helpful

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Roman Clodia

'If you can see, look. If you can look, observe.'

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 October 2020

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Part dystopia, part abstract philosophising, with thrillerish elements and an existential overlay. At times it is brutal almost to the point of unbearable but we need to remember that it draws on the events of twentieth century history (and beyond).

I like the fact that the white blindness is not easily or simplistically pinned down - at various times, it shifts between being a kind of existential hopelessness, at others a deliberate turning away from looking, yet again it can be turned inward, or even reversed so that loss of self is caused by and equated with other people's lack of seeing.

Saramago's life-long communism briefly appears in the centralised distribution of the food which is more effective and equitable than the free-for-all struggles of individuals but this isn't mere political allegory, and deals with more fundamental issues.

The not-blind doctor's wife is the closest thing to a main character, selflessly confining herself in the hospital in order not to be separated from her husband, and her quiet heroism is subsumed beneath his more overt authority. She is the one who makes some of the hardest decisions which take an emotional toll on her, and it's she who bonds with the dog of tears, an image of compassion and empathy that is, significantly?, not human.

The prose is compulsive, dispensing with punctuation which might slow it down, and also eroding grammatical barriers between voices, allowing individuals to be submerged within a single cacophonous utterance of humanity in all its terror, division, violence and love.

There is cruelty here, exploitation and the abuse of power; we see hierarchies form and be toppled; but there are also images of connection, of charity, and of strength coming from community. And, ultimately, the dog (god?) of tears.

One person found this helpful

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Great idea, poorly executed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 November 2019

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Blindness is a great idea for a story, an epidemic with a difference. Imprisoning the afflicted in a disused mental hospital and treating them the way the authorities do is genius. Unfortunately, the way it is written is terrible. The entire novel is composed of long sentences and long paragraphs without proper dialogue. There are conversations of a sort, but it is all contained in the narrative without speech marks or line breaks. It soon becomes very tedious. The way the group in the hospital interact initially is fascinating, but the monotony of the writing style soon wore me down. Blindness very nearly got a 1 star rating, but I've begrudgingly given it an extra star because of the great idea.

3 people found this helpful

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LizM

A must read!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 September 2018

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Just finished this book and know it is one I will never forget. I have lived and breathed it - when I put the book down I felt I was abandoning the characters and could imagine them in there, waiting for me to return! It takes a few pages to get used to the author’s writing style - there are no speech marks and sometimes it is difficult to know who is saying what. However, you soon realise that it doesn’t really matter. An horrific story as well as a heart-warming one. Very well thought out and imagined. A must read!

3 people found this helpful

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Linslade Blade

Harrowing.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 July 2019

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This was staggering. The loss of one sense and the world descends to disaster. The author captured this deterioration with a rich vein of words that make this scenario so believable if it happened. For one group however, one person can see and she wished she couldn't as she bears witness to the depravity the population sinks to not only to survive but to exploit the weak. It makes for a harrowing read but a must see to the bitter end.

2 people found this helpful

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Fabrizio, Ettore Ori

Good post-apocalyptic tale, plot not entirely credible

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 August 2020

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Mixture of zombie apocalypse and pandemic, I liked the choral structure with a strong group of main characters. Some plot developments are debatable and not believable, especially regarding the aftermath of the fight with the ruling ward and about the disease in general (probably he author wanted to keep the characters' perspective rather than being a narrator). Very easy to read if you like this genre (similar to movies like "The Cube", "28 days later"), not a masterpiece IMHO

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 July 2021

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This book has brought huge praise to the author, so I was surprised by how boring it is. Flat, nameless characters, irremedially (in my view) boring premise, plodding plot, poorly executed action sequences...and above all, meaningless, since what appears to be an allegorical tale collapses utterly in the final act, becoming yet another story about some bad stuff that happened to some people. I got to 98%, and then did not finish - I could not bear to read even the last 20-30 pages. If that tells you anything.

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