Reviews

Blindheten by José Saramago

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kumipaul's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

It's difficult to figure out how much I actually liked this book. It's certainly dark, disturbing, and depressing in some ways. At times it felt almost hopeless, as if the final pages might just end mid-sentence followed by white. Ok, that didn't happen, and I'm just telling you what it felt like to me. The idea of total blindness hitting almost like a nuclear weapon showed what a pandemic might look like in a w0rst case. We don't typically think of blindness as an end-of-the-world condition, but Saramago made that case. With the first few cases, the prospect was frightening, and as the blindness took over, it became dystopian and a true horror story. And the idea of sex as a weapon is sadly not even a foreign or unrealistic concept. I could see the death that the unnamed characters couldn't see, and I could smell the death and putrefaction that they smelled and had to largely ignore as part of survival. I felt the slime of excrement under my feet as they walked blindly through it. Sometimes I was annoyed by the endless paragraph without quotation marks and few punctuation marks to guide us. But...oh, yeah, our own bits of disorientation. In the end, I still wonder about the cause of this mysterious blindness with no obvious scientific explanation. I wonder if Saramago dug into religion to give us God's wrath as an option, which is an odd thought from this atheist reader.

garrett_schaffs's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

lhartlage's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective medium-paced

4.25

sas_lk's review against another edition

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challenging dark inspiring reflective tense slow-paced

5.0

This was an incredible novel about humanity, about what we can endure and how we still find beauty, joy, love, and simple pleasures when our world is turned upside down.
This was incredibly well written, and with so much thought, empathy and love. You can feel that Saramago poured so much into this and I think if this does not become a classic, I would be very disappointed.
At times it was very hard to read because of subject matter, but I appreciated every single chapter, and I feel that not one word was wasted.
This was simply beautiful, heart-wrenching, and in the end, simply hopeful.

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