A review by beatrice_apetrei
Blindness by José Saramago

4.0

This book mirrors perfectly the disintegration of society as blindness arises in each and every one of them, the source of it remaining unknown. Fear envelopes humanity, making them act less as humans and more like animals, for they remain unseen by the other and so their instinct of survival becoming an excuse for their lack of dignity is more important than reason, which kept them cautious. Where does this chaos begin ? How ? Why ? No one knows. They know that it can, or better said will, occur at any moment . Do you wear glasses ? Blindness does not care. Do you see perfectly? Are your eyes healthy ? Blindness does not care. Do you have any blind relatives? Once again, blindness does not care. Does it catch ? Apparently so, which drives people insane, in their desperate trying to keep blindness out of their lives, they do the best they could think of : they start a quarantine and throw inside everyone who encountered or witnessed it. This novel describes the unbelievable acts of people put under the curse of fear, how much can they endure until they give up? How much does hope linger in their hearts till it vanishes forever?

The writing is a bit difficult to get accustomed to. The novel is written in large blocks of text ( my edition even had pages with no paragraphs), with the dialogue incorporated in them, sometimes they may get hard to keep up with. It is not something bad, but it is surely different from anything I have read before. It requires a fresh mind and patience. A lot of it.

But even so, I managed to feel for the characters. They were so real, so strong and frightened, hopeful, stressed, organized, pained and so on. And oh, the Doctor’s Wife. Can I say how much I loved her, from beginning to the end? Such a loyal and strong woman, no matter how afraid she was when no one was watching. How at times she prayed for blindness because she couldn’t do it anymore. But she kept on moving, surviving through the disaster, giving her all to the ones in need. I. LOVED. HER. I still do. And I believe it is important to have such powerful women in novels. Mr. Saramago, I appreciate you for choosing her.

I’ve read comments about Blindness, about how it’s shaming blind people and making them seem more like animals than humans. And I disagree. This is not a story about blind people in general, but more about how something people are unprepared for can birth a living hell among citizens, how society falls apart when no one knows how to deal with such a crisis. Blindness comes in a variety of ways. In my opinion, vision felt always as the trickiest of the senses : nothing is as it looks like. Looks are deceiving, people are ashamed to be themselves under certain stares. “Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.” said the doctor, one of the protagonists.
Don’t let the assumption that this book is triggering ruin its ideas.

This book is terrifying. Frightening. A living nightmare. But it is in my opinion a must-read.

The question is : do we need eyes to see ? Do we need to go blind to appreciate the view of the sky at night, or the way grass dances in wind?