Blindness

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Subsequently, it was adapted for film and very recently for theatre showing at the Donmar Warehouse, London and starring Juliet Stevenson in their first post-lockdown piece of work. After an uprising, folks find out the asylum has been abandoned by the army who was until then responsible for it and they're able to leave. The novel concerns ‘the white evil’ a highly contagious pandemic that causes people to go blind and see nothing but whiteness.

FYI: Paperback editions of The History of the Siege of Lisbon and Baltasar and Blimunda will be issued simultaneously. The dystopian tale follows a group of characters as they come to terms with sudden blindness that ultimately affects the entire population.

Yes, Saramago's story is a clever idea, and, yes, he creates an intentional allegory to force us to think about the nature of humanity, but his ideas are clearly those of a privileged white male in a privileged European nation. A particularly bad band of men emerges, thieves and criminals who were probably bad before they were caged like animals. Untouched by human contradictions, animals are more alive because they are more secure than human beings.

Being attractive, or smart or any of the things that made men desire her, in the world before blindness, are suddenly immaterial. Doctors were baffled, unable to find a cure or slow down the symptoms to allow the human immune system to have a chance.

There is only one ‘real’ blind person, someone who was already blind even before the pandemic, but he is one of the bad guys. The film was a good, standard, Hollywood film meaning it appeals to the masses, has pretty people and no depth and has been designed to make money.

When the car thief gropes her on the way to the lavatory, she kicks him with a heeled shoe – giving him a wound which will eventually lead to his death. For me there were too many miraculous occurrences in it, which kind of destroyed the credibility at times ,but all told I'd give it a thumbs up and recommend it for those with an interest in modern fiction. Once inside, she attempts to help the compound organize, but she is increasingly unable to hold back the animality of the compound. The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined.Aș observa și faptul că, în Eseu despre orbire, naratorul / povestitorul nu este orb, el vede ceea ce orbii din casa de nebuni, din oraș, nu sînt în stare să vadă (cu excepția soției medicului oftalmolog). One character, a Cassandra of sorts, is excluded from the plague, and she guides the plot with her seeing eyes.

The double motif, which has fascinated authors as diverse as Poe, Dostoyevski and Nabokov, is revived in this surprisingly listless novel by Portuguese master Saramago. We have been brought up with the notion of blindness in which a person loses its ability to see things as they are, more often than not it reveals out empathy and compassion from us. The author has been able to create here an alternate reality without touching the easily sought after characteristics of science fiction, he doesn’t dive into any parallel universes, instead he just shows a world which is so strange by the word go, yet so much our own world; it takes us to the uncomfortable and unwanted recess of our memory and imagination however it is always there, which shows the ability of the author. That, then, leads me to wonder whether Saramago knew that his blind characters, their behaviour and attitudes rang false. The author avoids building characters by constantly describing them as "the doctors wife","the man with the eye patch" etc, letting your own imagination fill in the gaps,which may be a comment on corporate depersonalisation, but this was lost on me at the time of reading .

We have had moments where our stomachs rumble or experienced a headache due to a missed meal, but true hunger, not eating for days hunger we can only speculate about what that is like. The major characters of Saramago braved themselves to last extend of their perseverance, which comes out to be most essential of human qualities needed for survival, to remain afloat in this sea of white nothingness.