Blindness is one of the most terrifying books I've ever read. Written by 1998 Portuguese Nobel Laureate, Jose Saramago in 1995, it tells the story of a mysterious white blindness that infects Saramago's home nation of Portugal. Just as Dante tortures Italians in The Divine Comedy, Saramago tortures the members of his nation, portraying them as quite awful human beings in addition to infecting them with an illness that basically wipes them out. The heart of the novel takes place in an internment camp, where people struck by the blindness and suspected of being struck by the blindness are housed with minimal facilities and minimal food.
The first third of the book sets up the scene and the characters in the abandoned mental hospital that is used to intern the blind people in hopes of keeping the sickness from spreading. It is dark, but one could almost imagine it being a high-school play. Then it turns into equal parts Andersonville and Lord of the Flies, plus well, you can guess what they do to the women. The final third sees the main characters escaping the camp as the blindness spreads to the entire nation.
I read the audiobook, which is a lot easier than reading Saramago in print. Saramago doesn't use quotation marks or paragraph breaks to separate the different speakers. This distinction is effected in the audiobook by the narrator using different and consistent voices for each character. Blindness is an incredible piece of literature, and it was mentioned in particular by the Nobel committee when it awarded Saramago the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. I've already bought another book by this author.
I read the book, and I had to remind myself to breathe, in part because of that absence of punctuation that gives the tale a sense of extreme urgency. It is terrifying, and you are caught up in the horror of the people, and in the particular plight of the doctor's wife. If a person is in the least bit claustrophobic, he or she is probably going to be affected even more.
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