Blindness

I'm not sure how the novel "Blindness" entered my radar but it's been on my "to read" list for a little while now. "Blindness" was written by José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The story revolves around an unidentified town that is stricken by a blindness epidemic. Suddenly residents of the city become blind with a kind of hazy whiteness. What follows is the story of a group of nondescript people dealing with the onset of the epidemic, their experiences in quarantine by the government, and their eventual escape from what turns out to be a prison in an abandon mental institution.

Saramago is very descriptive in telling the hellish nightmare the quarantined people go through while being locked up in the abandoned mental facility. There are some heavy and disturbing events that progress as the situation deteriorates. Most of the observations are told through a doctor's wife who has somehow managed to avoid the blindness epidemic but in order to be with her husband, she has faked her own blindness and thus becomes an anchor for not only her husband but in parts for the entire quarantined community. The novel is very powerful and is a metaphor what for what true animals the human race really can be.

Highly recommended. The only downside I can see some having with the novel is the way in which it is written. The novel was translated from Portuguese so it has a European flavor to it and Saramago's writing style is unusual as well. The narrative doesn't incorporate line breaks for dialogue so everything is neatly compressed within sometimes long paragraphs. Though the style is a little different, I never had any problems following the story or dialogue by various different characters at one time.

I also believe the novel was made into a movie of the same name but I've never seen it.