Blindness by José Saramago
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The whole world is right here In an anonymous city, a car stays stopped after the light changes to green, infuriating other drivers. Approached, the driver shouts, “I’m blind! I can’t see!” A good Samaritan drives him home, saying, “Not at all. It’s your turn now. Later it will be my turn.” And then he drives off in the blind man’s car! Such is human nature in Portuguese author Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness (1995): “This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice.” Saramago imagines a sudden plague of blindness that makes the victims’ see only white. The “white sickness” has no known origin and is highly contagious. The authorities quickly quarantine anyone who has gone blind and anyone they’ve contacted, but from the start it’s too late. The first half of the novel concerns the hellish experience of the first newly blind people—imprisoned in an abandoned insane asylum, monitored by jittery soldiers, and left to fend for themselves without any support other than occasional food drop offs. Luckily for our group of first internees, among their number is an ophthalmologist and his wife, and she has mysteriously remained sighted and is only feigning blindness to stick with her husband. Thus, she is able to help organize her party for toilets and beds. As in H. G. Wells’ potent short story “In the Country of the Blind,” however, it’s not an unalloyed advantage to be able to see when confined with a bunch of blind people. The wife wants to keep her sight secret from the blind internees to avoid being exiled or enslaved by them, but it’s not easy to maintain the pretense, and as time passes and the inmates become ever filthier without being able to wash their bodies or clothes or use the toilets hygienically, the things she can see become ever more unpleasant. She at times wishes to become blind like the others, or to die. In vivid detail Saramago depicts the internees’ hellish situation, exacerbated by the frightened soldiers ordered to shoot any inmates who attempt to flee the asylum and by a group of well-organized blind thugs. They commandeer all the food and extort valuables and sex from the other internees, who are too cowed to resist. The more one reads, the more one fears there will be no explanation for the plague, no intrepid researchers to find a cure, no return to “normal.” I’m not spoiling the novel but merely pointing out how I felt while reading, far before I approached the end. Faithful to the concept that “these distasteful realities of life also have to be considered,” Saramago’s novel is not cheery. He vividly demonstrates the fragility of our modern “civilization,” dependent on electricity, running water, and systems of government, infrastructure, security, transportation, sanitation, and finance, etc. He does depict some of the best of human nature, as in a quasi-prostitute (“the girl with dark glasses”) who adopts a child (“the boy with the squint”), “the old man with the black eye-patch” who provides needed wisdom, and of course the doctor and his wife who are natural leaders. But the story is painful precisely because they are sympathetic characters we care about and because the people evincing the worst of human nature seem more numerous. Also, Saramago is so clinical and detailed in his account of what it would feel like to lose one’s eyesight, to become one of the asylum inmates, and yet to (of course) desperately want to survive, that his novel at times moves past the bracing into the unbearable. Indeed, when the blind thugs start gloatingly gang raping women, I almost quit reading. Although much of the novel is (nearly unbearably) bleak—and has long paragraphs and no chapters to take rest breaks after—it is worth persevering till the end, for there are many moving, memorable scenes, like the doctor’s wife and the girl with dark glasses hugging each other, the doctor’s wife finally using a pair of scissors, a timely fire wreaking havoc, the dog of tears gaining its nickname, the three graces washing themselves in the rain on a balcony, a shocking scene in a church, and two mismatched people confessing their love for each other. Furthermore, although many scenes in the book recall Bruegel’s appalling painting The Blind Leading the Blind, in which six blind men are following each other tumbling into a ditch, in the novel, after all, Saramago’s six blind main characters have a sighted saint to lead them. And if his characters say things like, “One way or another, we are all murderers,” they also say things like, “The only miracle we can perform is to go on living.” It’s also worth persevering through for its cool lines, like “A glass of water is a marvelous thing,” and “Animals are like people. They get used to anything,” and “If before every action, we were to weigh up all the consequences in earnest, immediate ones, probable ones, possible ones, and imaginable ones, good and evil from our deeds would go on apportioning themselves through all our days till the endless ones after we are gone, which might be a form of our immortality.” Saramaga’s novel reads like a fusion of Camus' The Plague and something by Kafka. It has the former’s awful and objective detail, ineffectual authorities, religious questioning, system limit revealing, human limit pushing, terrible suffering, unheroic heroes, and random fates, as well as the latter’s surreal quality, fatally absurd authorities, and anonymous city and characters (who are referred to by attributes). Blindness also recalls McCarthy’s The Road, though there are “seven pilgrims” instead of a father and son. The audiobook is read by the excellent Jonathan Davis, whose voice and manner enhance the text. View all my reviews
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