Blindness was fantastic--no wonder it won a nobel prize for literature.
It took me a couple of days to get used to the phrasing in the book. Saramago hardly ever used any line breaks (means no paragraphs AT ALL) and apparently the period is the only punctuation mark that he likes.
Which means most of the book reads like this:
How can blindness be contagious. No one has ever heard of anything like
this. A white blindness. It doesn't make any sense.
Who's there. It's only me. Do not worry. How can you ask me not to worry. I cannot stand this.
But after awhile I grew used to it, I had no idea how easily I read conversations because they were separated by breaks, or the inflections I read to myself depended not on the words in the book, but the punctuation marks at the end of the sentences.
The book is so good. It's about a white blindness that spreads throughout the country and what happens to people when they must start living like animals. The only one left with any sight is the wife of the eye doctor that examined the first man who went blind.
Also, hardly anybody has a name in the books, when they are referred to, it's by description "the first blind man's wife, the taxi driver," etc.
The way Saramago is able to describe everything through the eyes of the doctor's wife, and some of the terrible things that she is forced to witness is truly amazing.
More boggling is the state of the human mind as people are forced to start behaving like animals, and through it all, it is so very realistic. Not once did I think, 'no. people wouldn't act like that.' Instead, I questioned what I would have done had this happened to me and my family. The terrifying thought throughout the book is not that people are blind, it's that EVERYBODY is blind. The old, the young, the politicians, the workers; it's not as if you went blind and people could help you out--the world is blind. Nobody can see where he/she is going, or where he/she has been, some people went blind while driving, others while cooking, some while sleeping. It's a really fantastic thought.
This book is currently in production of becoming a movie. I have some doubts as to how this is going to transfer into film, but I think, in the right hands, it could turn out really well.
