Their hunger, however, had the strength only to take them three steps forward, reason intervened and warned them that for anybody imprudent enough to advance there was danger lurking in those lifeless bodies, above all, in that blood, who could tell what vapors, what emanations, what poisonous miasmas might not already be oozing forth from the open wounds of the corpses. Saramago has used quite intelligently one of the characters to infuse intrusive narration through “the doctor’s wife” whose eye balls remain utilitarian throughout the madness of Blind people. 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 military refuses to allow basic medicine to be delivered, which ensures that a simple infection becomes deadly. The government and police exit the city, expecting anarchy but what in fact ensues is harmony with the residents, to the consternation of the government, behaving impeccably.

Before we know, we are immersed in the horrifying surreal world of hopelessness, filth, violence, and hate, where the true enemy is not their affliction but people themselves, which we can see through the eyes of the only person who appears immune to blindness. After an uprising, folks find out the asylum has been abandoned by the army who was until then responsible for it and they're able to leave. I thought that the book is a metaphor of the people that are walking through life without thinking about the violence and cruelty that is in front of them, their ignorance of anything that could menace their civilized life. There must be a government, said the first blind man, I'm not so sure, but if there is, it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness.Aș mențona faptul că José Saramago a scris romanul despre „orbire” la 72-73 de ani, exemplu uimitor de fecunditate tardivă.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Glued continuously to the basques of the protagonists in their groping movements, the reader, stunned by the apocalyptic degree of the intrigue, will do so until the end. The book is more like a philosophical treatise, without being pedantic, on human existence which shows us our own fragility and fallibility through dismantling our society, crumbling our civilization to nothing. Given the characters' blindness, some of their names seem ironic ("the boy with the squint" or "the girl with the dark glasses"). Panicked, the government throws the affected into a disused asylum where gang warfare breaks out a la Lord of the Flies with one group of internees hoarding the food and holding the remaining internees to ransom first for their possessions and then for their women.They have no time to resolve their conflict, though, since the car thief is the first internee killed by the guards. Not at all disturbing, not at all compelling and not at all interesting, Jose Saramago's Blindness only succeeds in frustrating readers who take a moment to let their imagination beyond the page. Although I found this book interesting, I didn't find it the cutting edge work of genius that I had read about. 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. It's another contagion, where in a city people getting blind randomly starting from a traffic signal and then spreading through looking into their eyes.

It is like a social commentary using highly allegorical streamlined unique prose, as James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant", which may get sometimes a bit challenging to read due to its text having no quotation marks, no indentations when a speaker changes; however, if one could brave through initial pages then the book could not be put down. She seemingly contracted the “white-blindness” while visiting the doctor due to conjunctivitis (hence the dark glasses). Finally, hey woman who can see: why not grab a damn flashlight when going down a dark hall or worrying about night setting in?Acclaimed at the time, Blindness was one of the works noted when the author received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. What may appear a position of fortune is essentially an unfortunate gift to her in the city of Blind people as she has to witness all the horrors, horrific acts through her experienced but numb eyes. Fortunately, the altruistic behavior and intelligence of the doctor's wife somewhat attenuate the surrounding darkness! Though I have a bit of luxury in options- The Plague by Albert Camus and 1984 by George Orwell, to name a few- but Blindness made itself popped up out of sea of indecisiveness with eruption of glamour, the fact that Jose Saramago’ s world have been still elusive to me, must have played a part in it.