In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.

In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.

Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.

And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber


From Publishers Weekly
Brilliant Portuguese fabulist Saramago (The History of the Siege of Lisbon) has never shied away from big game. His previous works have rewritten the history of Portugal, reimagined the life of Christ and remodeled a continent by cleaving the Iberian peninsula from Europe and setting it adrift. Here, Saramago stalks two of our oldest themes in the tale of a plague of blindness that strikes an unnamed European city. At the novel's opening, a driver sits in traffic, waiting for the light to change. By the time it does, his field of vision is white, a "milky sea." One by one, each person the man encounters?the not-so-good Samaritan who drives him home, the man's wife, the ophthalmologist, the patients waiting to see the ophthalmologist?is struck blind. Like any inexplicable contagion, this plague of "white sickness" sets off panic. The government interns the blind, as well as those exposed to them, in an abandoned mental hospital guarded by an army with orders to shoot any detainee who tries to escape. 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. As order at the mental hospital breaks down and the contagion spreads, the depraved overpower the decent. When the hospital is consumed in flames, the fleeing internees find that everyone has gone blind. Sightless people rove in packs, scavenging for food, sleeping wherever they can. Throughout the narrative, one character remains sighted, the ophthalmologist's wife. Claiming to be blind so she may be interned with her husband, she eventually becomes the guide and protector for an improvised family. Indeed, she is the reader's guide and stand-in, the repository of human decency, the hero, if such an elaborate fable can have a hero. Even after so many factual accounts of mass cruelty, this most sophisticated fiction retains its peculiar power to move and persuade. Editor, Drenka Willen. (Sept.) FYI: Paperback editions of The History of the Siege of Lisbon and Baltasar and Blimunda will be issued simultaneously.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
To describe as allegory this story of unnamed characters in an unnamed city who are struggling with an undiagnosed epidemic of "white blindness" is both too simple and too complex. Beyond any emblematic purpose, the characters act out life with all its paradoxes and hidden truths. Ultimately, the greater meaning here is the simple story of human frailty and community in the modern world. In searing prose, both complex and minimal, all this and nothing more is revealed. No wonder Saramago won the Nobel prize this year. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Andrew Miller
There is no cynicism and there are no conclusions, just a clear-eyed and compassionate acknowledgment of things as they are, a quality that can only honestly be termed wisdom.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Richard Eder
Blindness is the darkest and most concentrated of Saramago's books. With a grim, sometimes monotonously repetitive accumulation of detail, he constructs what in some respects could be a circle of Dantean hell....


The Boston Globe, Robert Taylor
The prose of Blindness is crystalline in the English translation by the late Giovanni Pontiero, and readers can easily catch its ironies, lyricism, and wry humor. In certain respects, though, the style proves daunting ... but it means that like all books of real stature, Blindness requires undiluted time and attention.... a shattering work by a literary master.


From Booklist
Less an allegory than a mature writer's inspired characterization of human nature, this book opens with a driver being struck blind at a stoplight. Soon, so are his wife, the doctor who examines him, and the doctor's other patients: a pretty young woman, a worn-out old man, and a young boy. The doctor's wife retains her vision but claims to be blind so she can help the others, but she then has to witness the horrors of blind human nature as the government quarantines them in a mental hospital under armed guard. That cannot stop the disease from spreading, nor does being blind prevent human behavior from expressing itself. As in Golding's Lord of the Flies, a hierarchy of terror arises behind closed doors as more blind arrive. They hoard and share, love and rape, fight and heal. Eventually, the doctor's group escapes and returns to his house, where the world starts to return to normal. Saramago's novel deftly shows how vulnerable humans are, how connected and how blind. Kevin Grandfield


The Houston Chronicle, November 22, 1998
"Blindness, like all of Saramago's work is rewarding for being challenging in narrative technique (artfully translated by longtime collaborator Giovanni Pontiero, who died putting on the finishing touches). Saramago switches tenses and points of view, his grammar is idiosyncratic, he frequently makes authorial asides, and he's partial to page-long sentences encompassing various perspectives and time frames. "But he's so dexterous in his literary machinations that the pieces come together into an existential jigsaw puzzle. "Saramago isn't didactic...He's humane. For better and for worse, duress is a powerful motivator, and generosity and altruism are 'the two best traits in human nature,' though selfishness and cruelty rear themselves nearly as often. Fellow-feeling, most of all, outlasts chaos and degradation, the arbitrary exigencies of existence...."Abounding in the perseverance and hope (and absurdity and horror) of everyday lives, Blindness is of the ages: profound by being elemental. It's a major contribution to Saramago's oeuvre. May he live to 100. He has more books to write."


Hungry Mind Review, Winter 1998-1999
At the beginning of Blindness the reader is tempted to search for and tease out the exact implications of a loss of sight, to understand precisely what sort of meanings Saramago's white blindness suggests. The reader considers, mulls over, and discards a number of ideas: the book is a futuristic parable about AIDS or some other infectious disease; it presents a meditation on the contagious nature of ignorance ('this must be the most logical illness in the world, the eye that is blind transmits the blindness to the eye that sees'); or it depicts a socio-political nightmare, the blind leading the blind being the surest path to mayhem...[yet]...Blindness resists single-minded interpretations. This is a brilliant exploration of the human conscience, offered in poetic and revelatory language.


Book Description
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature



Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Portugese

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. A city is hit by an epidemic of 'white blindness.' The blindness spreads, sparing no one. Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards. Inside, the criminal element among the blind hold the rest captive: food rations are stolen, women are raped. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers through the barren streets. The developments within this oddly anonymous group -- the first blind man, the old man with the black eye patch, the girl with dark glasses, the boy with no mother, and the dog of tears -- are as uncanny as the surrounding chaos is harrowing.

A parable of loss and disorientation, of man's worst appetities and hopeless weaknesses, Blindness is one of the most challenging, thought-provoking, and ultimately exhilarating novels published in any language in recent years.

SYNOPSIS

The stunningly powerful novel of man￯﾿ﾽs will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

FROM THE CRITICS

Independent (London)

A bold piece of work -- almost biblical in scale and style, hauntingly sustained.

Jesse Barrett

More frightening than Stephen King, as unrelenting as a bad dream, José Saramago's Blindness politely rubs our faces in apocalypse. Its detailed history of an unaccountable epidemic of "white blindness" that inundates the nameless inhabitants of a nameless country makes you fear for your own sight: Have the corners of the pages dimmed ever so slightly? Saramago won this year's Nobel Prize for literature, and at 76 his powers have not dimmed: This fable is so unsettling, so limitlessly allegorical -- the Holocaust, AIDS and Bosnia come to mind -- that it feels infinite. "The whole world is right here," one character tells another. Blindness merely amplifies everyone's fundamental helplessness and interdependence and makes plain the lies they tell themselves to get through the day. As a blind ophthalmologist puts it, his useless expertise an emblem of the surplus with which we all burden ourselves, "Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are."

In Saramago's view, that truth is what we cannot bear to see. Strip away the power of our eyes, "the windows to the soul" -- a metaphor with which the author teases us repeatedly -- and what's left, he suggests, is little more than ravenous beasts mauling their competitors in the fight for survival. "Evil ... as everyone knows, has always been the easiest thing to do." The reasoned calm with which Saramago depicts the unspeakable (as society collapses outside its walls, the main characters, the first to go blind, struggle for survival inside the asylum in which they have been quarantined) makes the reader long for mercy, for some release from the suffering. And even when that release comes, when the inmates escape the asylum to wander a world gone blind, it's hard to know what to make of it. Are we better off learning to live with our blindness or glorying in what little we can see? And when sight returns, what seems at first to be a happy ending may be anything but.

A metaphor like "white blindness" might easily seem forced or labored, but Saramago makes it live by focusing on the stubbornly literal; his account of a clump of newly blind people trying to find their way to food or to the bathroom provides some surprisingly gripping passages. While this epidemic has a clear symbolic burden, it's also a real and very inconvenient affliction. Saramago is familiar with this balancing act: he has an affinity for skepticism, and his curling, run-on sentences, some of them lasting several ages, have the dense eventfulness, but rarely the tilt into fantasy, of Gabriel García Márquez's in Autumn of the Patriarch. The result is a minute study of how effortlessly we can be divested of all that we call "humanity," how fear and selfishness conspire to let us do our worst. "God does not deserve to see," thinks the doctor at the book's lowest point, and Saramago's powerful achievement is to make his readers wonder: What have we wrought by choosing so selectively what we can bear to look in the face? -- Salon

James Wood

. . .[T]he story. . .lives in the spread of its particulars, and in the conviction of its allegory. . . .We are all . ..confirming ourselves by closing our eyes and thinking of each other. —The New Republic

Village Voice

. . .[T]his year's most propulsive, and most profound, thriller. . .

Library Journal

To describe as allegory this story of unnamed characters in an unnamed city who are struggling with an undiagnosed epidemic of "white blindness" is both too simple and too complex. Beyond any emblematic purpose, the characters act out life with all its paradoxes and hidden truths. Ultimately, the greater meaning here is the simple story of human frailty and community in the modern world. In searing prose, both complex and minimal, all this and nothing more is revealed. No wonder Saramago won the Nobel prize this year. (LJ 8/98) Read all 9 "From The Critics" >

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