Cons: Difficult to read, difficult to understand, unbelievable society.
The Bottom Line: It is a frustrating book to read, though the story premise is fascinating. His writing style was difficult and took me out of the story. Forewarned is forearmed.
Perhaps Saramago got the Pulitzer prize for provoking the peewaddin out of the judges. Yes, this story made me think...sometimes about the society he constructed, but more often about how irritating was his experimental writing style.
A man is sitting at a red light at an intersection when he finds himself suddenly blind....we soon find others are afflicted with this strange white blindness, many of whom are herded together and taken to some sort of internment camp.
I think the society that Saramago creates is unbelievable. I may be a Pollyanna, but I think once-sighted-but-now-blinded folk would not let his or her personal hygiene and ethics sink to quite the level described in the book. Haven't you tried to imagine how difficult it might be to be clean if you couldn't see the dirt? But then, didn't you also imagine that having once seen filth, you would still retain a desire to be clean? Saramago seems to believe otherwise, and his characters are uncharacteristically filthy, in my opinion.
I did find the government actions somewhat believable - the stupider they are, the more believable they become. And when the blind folks find themselves less and less able to communicate rationally with the men "in charge", I became more interested. Most of us can relate to an unresponsive, uncaring bureaucracy.
Other times, too many of them, I was jolted out of the story by perceptions that just didn't jibe...sometimes I wondered if he was writing about an alternate universe and I had to keep reminding myself that Saragamo is Portugese and his perceptions would differ from my born white 20th century American perceptions...but he missed the mark - often. I just couldn't relate to most of the characters.
His cute naming conventions became cumbersome - the first blind man, the girl with dark glasses. I don't need a name to identify with a character, but it became difficult to remember if the boy with the squint was related to the blind man's wife and if she was the one who had an affair with the old man, no I think that was the second blind man...see what I mean?
The writing style has been proclaimed by experts to be "novel", I found it tedious. When characters speak, I fully expect to see a paragraph break and some quotes around somewhere to give me fair warning. Whenitisallruntogetheryoubegintowonderiftheattemptatstylewasperhapsgettinginthewayofhisstory. Note: I typed that last sentence that way on purpose to illustrate my point.
I found the story IDEA to be extremely thought provoking. Saramago's story, however, was difficult to read and just didn't sound like any city or town that I know. Perhaps, if I would have gone into this as an alternate universe story, I could have more easily overlooked the incongruencies.
Or perhaps I have become too accustomed to Stephen King...just imagine how he might approach that story premise. :)
Portuguese Nobel Laureate Saramago tells a fantastic tale about a city hit by an epidemic of white blindness, in this work that is the basis for the u...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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