Search - Blindness (Harvest Book)

One of the best pieces of fiction I have ever read. It is a challenge to read it, no doubt, as there are no character names or even quotation marks to indication dialogue between people. It's like reading Faulkner, in some ways. But once you get the hang of it, it is an amazing story about an epidemic of white blindness that strikes a town, and eventually spreads around the world. It is a commentary as to how society treats the ill, and poses questions as to the disaster preparedness and reaction by the government, military and humanity as a whole. A superb book!

A novel in which an entire population of people is struck with "white blindness" and the general breakdown of civilization which ensues. We follow a group who are linked by having all been exposed to the blindness in (ironically) an opthamologist's office. They are among the first of those to be rounded up and put into quarantine in what used to be a mental institution, and left food and supplies at erratic intervals, but otherwise left to their own devices.

It's a very abstract, allegory-type novel, not your everyday straightforward bestseller. You know there's a deeper meaning beyond the surface but you have to really work a bit harder to get the full experience.

The author won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this novel in 1998.

The storyline sounds good, and the story even starts out good. It begins to go downhill very quickly. It's VERY abstract and lacks important punctuation. You really have to concentrate to read it, it's not a leisure book at all. I didn't even finish it. I couldn't keep up!

Interesting concept. Different execution. Strange writing style. I'm not entirely sure if it was a translation thing or if Saramago just writes without punctuating (which I've glanced at one of his other books and it seems to be the case). The story is very deep in the sense of examining what it is to be human and how vastly different reactions and personalities can be in events of crisis. And it does a superb job at commenting on what it is to be blind metaphorically as well as literally.

This is an interesting book about an unknown city in an unknown country that is plagued by an unknown "white blindness" that first strikes a man driving his car. It soon spreads to the man's wife, the doctor who examines him, and other people with whom he has come into contact with. Soon it turns into a national crisis with hundreds of new blind victims turning up daily. The blind are first kept quarantined in an old hospital, guarded by the military, but it quickly becomes apparent that the entire country or city has become blinded, and chaos ensues.

This is a great book written by a talented author, but it has some unique features. First, his sentences are very long and run-on sentences, sometimes going the length of a full page. Secondly, he uses no quotation marks when characters are speaking; you can figure out who is speaking from the other details, but it sometimes gets confusing and I had to backtrack frequently to figure out where I left off. Finally, the characters themselves don't even have proper names like one would expect in a more mainstream novel. Instead, the author identifies his characters by their relations to one another: the first blind man, the first blind man's wife, the doctor, the girl with the dark glasses and so on. Because of all this, it took me longer than usual to read this book, but I'm very glad that I did.

It was an enjoyable read, in the end.

I really liked this story....kept me interested and reading well into the night after I should have stopped and gone to sleep. I've heard that the movie that was made from this is not worth watching, so I will just keep the story fresh in my mind from the book. The characters were all very interesting, story flowed well. I have thought about this book long after finishing it, and recommended it to many. It's very dark, and disturbing, but plausible?
Nancy Dickey