Scan barcode
A review by kris_mccracken
Blindness by José Saramago
2.0
Blindness by José Saramago
José Saramago's Blindness tracks an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city and swiftly following social breakdown. I must confess that I struggled with this one. It's not the story, which is unremittingly grim. Nor is it the experimental form of pages of run-on sentences and unparagraphed dialogue with nary a quotation mark in sight.
No, it is the unrelenting baroque nature of Saramago's writing (or perhaps that of his translator). The bane of many a translation from a romance language, I struggled with the overly florid verbiage in even the direst circumstances. Honestly, I can't quite imagine someone coming out with the following amidst pack rape, mass starvation amidst piles of human shit:
The plotline is intriguing enough, but I confess to finding the interminable soliloquies wearisome.
⭐ ⭐ ½
José Saramago's Blindness tracks an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city and swiftly following social breakdown. I must confess that I struggled with this one. It's not the story, which is unremittingly grim. Nor is it the experimental form of pages of run-on sentences and unparagraphed dialogue with nary a quotation mark in sight.
No, it is the unrelenting baroque nature of Saramago's writing (or perhaps that of his translator). The bane of many a translation from a romance language, I struggled with the overly florid verbiage in even the direst circumstances. Honestly, I can't quite imagine someone coming out with the following amidst pack rape, mass starvation amidst piles of human shit:
“Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.”
The plotline is intriguing enough, but I confess to finding the interminable soliloquies wearisome.
⭐ ⭐ ½