I'll post the review I wrote right after I read it:
***
With Blindness, the amazing Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, a former winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has created a compelling tale, translated by Giovanni Pontiero who, sadly, passed away as he was correcting the proofs. Saramago's stories do not tend to be dark, but this one - despite the frightening whiteness around which this novel is built up - is by far the most nightmarish.
The premise is unbelievably simple, and therefore all the more scary - what would happen if an epidemic of blindness broke out? And that's exactly what happens in this brilliant novel. To avert the escalation of this strange phenomenon, the handful of people who have contracted this socalled white sickness are rounded up and quarantined in an empty mental hospital. There are two wings, separated by a kind of no-man's land, each wing with a courtyard and three wards. There's a core group of characters, and the book never lets them out of sight (pun, I must admit, intended). These "seven pilgrims" consist of the first blind man, his wife, the doctor who examined the first blind man, the doctor's wife, and three of the doctor's patients. The extraordinary thing is, this (descriptions as above) is all the reader will know them by - no name is ever mentioned.
Blindness is stitched together with long sentences - the dialogues often separated only by commas, so that even the most attentive reader may stumble and have some doubt as to who is speaking. At first this may seem troublesome and irritating, but, in a book about the loss of sight or perspective, the stylistic devices Saramago uses only enhance your experience of the predicament the characters are in - a brilliant find.
All in all, this is a compelling read - the quality literally drips from the pages, and you will not be able to put this down until you know what will happen to these people, people you don't even know the names of.
Buy this, read this, now.
***
Cheers
