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Blindness, by Jose Saramago - Oct 07
Well, let's get this started, then!
[b]Blindness[/b], by Jose Saramago
In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.
In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.
Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.
And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber (Amazon.com)
-------------------------------------------------
I read some of the reviews on Amazon.com, but most of them are from people complaining about Saramago's style, or the "excessive filth". None of those were problems for me, what about for you guys?
I found one of those reviews to be quite funny, actually. Some guy said it was an unrealistic story, because.. "where were the CDC guys with their biohazard suits?!"
Some questions:
- The white blindness comes and goes without any logical explanation. It's not made clear why it happened in the first place, or how it spread so quickly. How real do you think the illness was? We all know the effects suggestion and mass hysteria might have, do you think it could've played a part in this? Or was it a genuine, highly-contagious disease?
- How could the doctor's wife remain immune to it? Was she just lucky?
- There are many ways to read into this book, with different metaphors and allegories. What did you see as the main theme in the book? Collective power, false appearances, fragility of the society, fragility of the individuals, perhaps?
- Do you think the doctor's wife could've done a better job, specially during their time in the mental hospital? Sure, she helped a lot, but many bad things happened too. Could she have avoided any of those? Or was it the best she (or anyone else in her shoes) could do, without putting herself at risk?
As many of you might know, Blindness is being adapted into a movie picture, to be released sometime next year. The director is [url=http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0576987/]Fernando Meirelles[/url] (City of God / The Constant Gardener)
I found out that he has a [url=http://blogdeblindness.blogspot.com/]blog[/url] where he posts some things related to the shooting, and his overall experience. Everything is in Portuguese, and Google's auto translation is very sloppy. I'll read it later and see if there's anything worth discussing. If anyone wants to check it out and have parts translated, just ask!
edit-
Oh, since I read the Portuguese version of the book, I apologize in advance for any possible inaccurate quotes, terms or even character names. My way of translating it might be different from the official translation.
Oh wow. This is going to be interesting. You're leading an English book discussion off of a Portuguese translation. I have to commend you for stepping forward. From your opening post - I don't think you're going to have to worry about doing a good job.
Everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation - Tender Branson
.jpg "PHiN's picture")
I will just post what I thought of the book and add more comments later.
This was my first Saramango book and surely not my last. I had the misconception that since he was a Nobel Prize Winner I would have struggled to get through the book with a decent grasp of it. I was pleasantly surprised to find it accesible and thought provoking.
It reminded me of The Pearl by Steinbeck in that the city was never named or any specfic time to let us know that this could be happening any place in the world. Same too for not giving each character a name.
Dark past, bright future, living abroad, well read. You're like the reincarnation of James Dean, hopefully with better driving skills ( Tomstrong on me, best compliment I ever got! )
Speaking of similar books, in many reviews I saw people saying it was quite similar to Camu's 'The Plague' and Wyndham's 'The Day of the Triffids'. Has anyone ever read those?
I got a chance to check Meirelles' blog, and some interesting things:
In 98, Meirelles read the book, and thought about making a movie of it. He called Saramago's editor in Brazil and asked about it, but Saramago answered with a definite "no". He gave up on it and went on with his career.
In 2006, he got an email from a Canadian producer wondering if he was interested in adapting a Saramago book. He didn't even know the guy, but thought, What the hell?
Three days later, he got the script for Blindness.
He visited Saramago in Lisbon earlier this year, and he was surprisingly excited about the project, even though he didn't want to talk about the book or give any insights about characters or the plot. His one and only 'request' is that the Dog of Tears "has to be a very big dog".
That's funny, because I didn't imagine a big dog at all. I imagined an average black, dirty mutt
I'll translate a book analysis by him later.
i REALLY enjoyed this book. i had to read it for a stage design class many years ago, and have gone back many times since. there are some incredibly haunting scenes. particularly, in the church, when the doctors wife is looking at the stained glass in the windows. mind blowing.
that character, the doctors wife, was particularly intriguing to me. i am always drawn to strong female characters, and i appreciated that while you could sense her strength, there was also an o bvious vulnerability to her.
i dont really have anything important to add.
I've finally been able to start the book.
At first look - I thought I was going to hate it. No seperation for dialogue. Paragraphs that went on for pages. But the writing is very poetic. It just moves along and I find myself not looking ahead to see when the chapter ends.
Those are my thought right now. I'm only a couple chapters in though.
Everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation - Tender Branson
[QUOTE=xec8;1075235]I don't know if this has already been discussed, but as a Portuguese guy I need to make sure you people know that Blindness has a sequel, called Seeing. Apparently it's also good.[/QUOTE]
Yeah - I saw that on my last trip to the book store. It sounded really cool.
I guess that shows you how much I'm digging this book. I'm only half done with it and I'm already looking at other books that this guy has written. I just wish that I had the time to devote like a whole day to reading it so I could get it done with.
Everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation - Tender Branson
Spoilers!!!
Holy fuck. That novel was intense. The scenes in the asylum are horrific, yet made up of the most mundane details of human existence. The prose is so balanced, and well-paced. I can't imagine how the impact of the book differs from the Portugese. The translation is beautiful! Such a clean, linear style, and I just grew in my attachment to the characters as the novel expanded. I wanted to kill the leader of the asylum hooligans myself! That's how much I identified with the characters. Damn, I enjoyed that. :fing02:
My only complaint is the sort of unexplained magic behind the onset of the white blindness and it's lifting. What the fuck is that? He doesn't give ya anything. Just willing suspension of disbelief?
[IMG]http://i185.photobucket.com/albums/x40/callred10/Bukowskisig.jpg[/IMG]
You know, my dad works at the University of Coimbra, in Portugal, which is one of Europe's oldest universities, and his girlfriend is one of the rectors of the university, and they're both friends with Saramago, and apparently he's not a very pleasant man. The girlfriend, in particular, thinks the Nobel Prize should have gone to another important Portuguese writer, Antonio Lobo Antunes, who is an amazing stylist and great at what he does.
So, what I'm saying is, if you want to read a book by an equally important Portuguese writer, sometimes called the Faulkner of Portuguese Lit, then check him out.
I finally finished this book yesterday.
Man, it was beautiful. I thought i was going to hate it because the style was different. And I didn't know about the whole long paragraphs and no broken up dialogue - as I repeatedly stated. But this was a great book.
This book would be a great read for a socialogy report or study.
Later tonight when I have a little more free time I'm going to go through and read what everybody else has posted and read the questions again. Hopefully we can get the conversation going again!
Everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation - Tender Branson
It's great to see everyone here is digging the book, even if the discussion is a bit slow. I consider it one of the best book's I've ever read, which is why I recommended it for the book club in the first place.
I'm actually planning on re-reading it soon (I have to get through about ten other books first).... and then on to the sequel, Seeing. And somewhere in there I need to actually finish this novel I'm working on...
PGoutis01 - I definitely didn't have that reaction... I knew from the first sentence that the book was going to blow my mind.
And to think that it's a translation!
Kristopher
[QUOTE=xec8;1075361]Saramago was Portugal's first Nobel Literature laureate. He's a hardcore communist, too![/QUOTE]
He is, isn't he? On Meirelles' blog he had an interesting view about it, on how the main group of characters works almost on a communist way. They always stayed together, making sacrifices for the greater good of all, everyone had their say on the matters, etc. I hadn't thought of it that way, and it made sense.
I didn't have much time to be online lately, too many tests in college. But I'm back now for any discussions.
[QUOTE=Kristopher Young;1084771]It's great to see everyone here is digging the book, even if the discussion is a bit slow. I consider it one of the best book's I've ever read, which is why I recommended it for the book club in the first place.
I'm actually planning on re-reading it soon (I have to get through about ten other books first).... and then on to the sequel, Seeing. And somewhere in there I need to actually finish this novel I'm working on...
PGoutis01 - I definitely didn't have that reaction... I knew from the first sentence that the book was going to blow my mind.
And to think that it's a translation!
Kristopher[/QUOTE]That was my reaction from flipping through it. Not after I started reading. I really liked it right after I started.
Everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation - Tender Branson
[QUOTE=PHiN;1064519]I read some of the reviews on Amazon.com, but most of them are from people complaining about Saramago's style, or the "excessive filth". None of those were problems for me, what about for you guys?[/QUOTE]I thought the excessive filth was absolutely necessary. Without the filth the story would be most unrealistic. Where would people go to the bathroom? There is no running water - eventually toilets would overflow. If you don't want to stink up the house - and knowing the toilet would overflow - you would go outside. Or anywhere else.
As for the quarantine area - those people had no direction. They didn't have any idea of what was being done for them. The were scared. They were in a strange place. And nobody else there could see. I would assume that if nobody could see you, you would pick your nose openly. One little thing leads to the next.
[QUOTE=PHiN;1064519]I found one of those reviews to be quite funny, actually. Some guy said it was an unrealistic story, because.. "where were the CDC guys with their biohazard suits?!"[/QUOTE]Weren't those the guys going around picking everybody up? The "disease" still spread even though they were so careful...
[QUOTE=PHiN;1064519]- The white blindness comes and goes without any logical explanation. It's not made clear why it happened in the first place, or how it spread so quickly. How real do you think the illness was? We all know the effects suggestion and mass hysteria might have, do you think it could've played a part in this? Or was it a genuine, highly-contagious disease?[/QUOTE]When I put the book down at the end - I thought this same thing. I used to - and sometimes still do - dabble in magic (like conjuring type, not witchcraft) and I really like mind reading or thought projection type stuff. The best stuff relies on the theories of suggestion. Go watch an episode of that show Derren Brown did on Scifi. Here's a clip:
[youtube]3Vz_YTNLn6w[/youtube]
I think that the fact that he screws up - proves that some people just aren't easily influenced while others are easily suggested to. I've read a lot on the subject and a lot is possible with enough confidence and conviction in your voice.
[QUOTE=PHiN;1064519]- How could the doctor's wife remain immune to it? Was she just lucky?[/QUOTE]This is the part that confuses me. Maybe there were more. She was so afraid to speak up - not telling anybody until almost the end. She didn't want to be ridiculed for being different. Yet she was the only one that was "normal." Maybe there was others that were not affected and they were just to afraid to speak up. That is also one of the ways to use the power of suggestion to your advantage.
[QUOTE=PHiN;1064519]- There are many ways to read into this book, with different metaphors and allegories. What did you see as the main theme in the book? Collective power, false appearances, fragility of the society, fragility of the individuals, perhaps?[/QUOTE] I would have to say that from your statements - this was a fragility of society issue. You see - without society holding us down - many of us are capable of unspeakable acts. Is it the fear of hell, the fear of government, or just something inside of you that stops you from killing? What if you were born into a society where it's ok? What if you were born into a society that would be too blind or stupid to know who did it?
As individuals we may be strong - but our environment molds us. That is why I said that this book would make a great study for sociology as a book report or a lesson or an example.
[QUOTE=PHiN;1064519]- Do you think the doctor's wife could've done a better job, specially during their time in the mental hospital? Sure, she helped a lot, but many bad things happened too. Could she have avoided any of those? Or was it the best she (or anyone else in her shoes) could do, without putting herself at risk?
[/QUOTE]I think she was scared. If you could help but doing so would make everybody possibly hate you - would you? You might help for the minute - but soon sleep on your own in the hallway or something. I don't know if that question is really possible to answer now that I think about it.
Everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation - Tender Branson
I read this book a while ago, thought it was excellent.
One of the questions I had in my mind while reading it is the effect that the annonymity of blindness had on the 'inmates'. E.g. did they become less human by not seeing because they had lost their identities, sense of self and humanity etc., and as they could no longer perceive themselves in the manner to which they were accustomed, did this contribute to their actions? I suppose it raises the question of how important the sense of sight is to our perception of ourselves as individuals and humanity as a whole. Anyway, I'm rambling incoherently but I just figured it was an interesting issues which occured to me when I read the book.
Looking forward to reading Seeing next.
i had to read blindness in high school and i absolutely loved it. i wrote afew papers and what not on it... and a few years later read it again in college. it's been a few years since then though, so i think i may give it another go... only problem is i have like 5 other books to read before that... man i went through a total dryspell with books where i had NOTHING to read... and now i have an over abundance....what a great feeling,
I just finished Blindness the other night, and really enjoyed it.
I had heard before I picked it up that Saramago is communist, and it definitely comes through in his writing. The idea that the characters loose their individuality, and the fact that the characters are never given names, really gives the sense of a collective entity. Even the format of the writing itself is surrounded by this idea of a collective. There are no quotation marks to separate the statements of the characters, nor are there even periods or paragraph breaks for long stretches.
I also found it interesting that the villains of the story were those that tried to retain their individuality, such as the quarantine hooligans. The hooligans are extremely evil in their individuality, trying to improve their personal fortunes (food, personal belongings) through the devastation of the many.
I just wanted to throw a few of my thoughts in. I saw that there were a few other people who just finished the book as well. Hopefully we can get a couple more comments.
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