“Blindness” by José Saramago
This eerie tale of a highly-contagious illness that strikes one suddenly blind keeps coming to mind this pandemic-infused year. How quickly the citizenry of the novel degenerated into cold-hearted mobs. Would we do much better?
It's an ugly story, well-told. Citizens of a modern city are suddenly afflicted with blindness, not just a few of them, but most of them. Quickly all the trappings of civilization are shed as they kill, rape, and misuse one another. Saramago narrates all this without benefit of quote marks, indentation, or other normal paragraphing, giving it all a breathless rushed feeling, as if he has to get the story out before he or I are also struck with the white blindness.
Of course, Saramago is telling a bigger story, one in which we are reminded that we are one disaster away from savagery. As I said, it was interesting, but I'm not sure if I liked it.
The perfect companion read to this would be H.G. Wells’ short-story, In the Country of the Blind.
“From Nobel Prize–winning author José Saramago, a magnificent, mesmerizing parable of loss
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength” (GoodReads).
