Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Blindness (Harvest Book) by Jose Saramago ISBN: 0-15-600775-4 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 04 October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.19 (224 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Great High-Wire Act
Comment: Blindness is my introduction to Saramago. A good friend at Amazon suggested this writer to me. Though he'd won a Nobel, I'd never heard of him, which comes as no surprise as I've read only about half the Nobel winners' and am totally in the dark when it comes to about 15 names on the list.
What strikes me most stongly about this book is the author's challenges he sets up for himself early on. As more and more characters are introduced, the challenge of keeping track of who is speaking and who is where mounts exponentially. I kept saying to myself "How's he going to do it when the wards fill up?" As noted throughout the reviews, Saramago does not provide us with the usual authorial roadmap.
What surprises me is that only one other reviewer (Michael Lima) mentioned that this stylistic maneuvering is a great metaphor for the subject matter. As readers, we are disoriented by the lack of accustomed punctuation, among other things. We have to pause sometimes to get our bearings. "Who said that?" we ask ourselves. It's exactly appropos to the way the blind characters react in the novel. Saramago wants the reader disoriented so that the empathy we feel for his characters becomes more pronounced. We share an awareness of what they are experiencing first-hand. We too have to grope our way in the dark, without the usual guideposts. The characters go unnamed. As one of the chracters thinks to himself,"names are of no importance here." We know them only as "the first blind man" or the "girl with dark glasses" or "the doctor's wife." One reviewer objected to this device, citing "the dog of tears" as an example of Saramago's ineptitude. I would counter that this is another intentional choice on Saramago's part to maintain the purity of his allegory. Characters in true allegory are never specified by common name. Just think of Spenser's "The Fairy Queen" or Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" and you'll see what I mean. Saramago's characters operate as universal types in large part because they are nameless.
Often, Saramago provides us with stunning imagery, as in this example when the opthalmologist first discovers he is blind: "He turned to where a mirror was, and this time he did not wonder, What's going on, he did not say, There are a thousand reasons why the human brain should close down, he simply stretched out his hands to touch the glass, he knew that his image was there watching him, his image could see him, he could not see his image."
My only criticisms of the work are minor. They usually have to do with suspension of disbelief. I had to wonder why the doctor's wife didn't seize the thug's gun for instance after he was down. Also, when she entered the basement of the store, why didn't she first get a flashlight? Certainly that wouldn't have been an item that would have been hard to find under the circumstances. I also had a bit of difficulty digesting some of Saramago's homilies and folksy philosophizing, as in "her fingers brushed against the dead petals, how fragile life is when it is abandoned," or later: "...but none of us, lamps, dogs or humans, knows at the outset, why we have come into this world." Not exactly the most profound material around.
I would also differ with those who maitain that the narrative is detached or distant. Sometimes I found it obtrusive, as in the narrator's description of a statement made by the girl with dark glasses: "...surprisingly, if we consider that we are dealing with a person without much education, the girl with the dark glasses said, Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are." I would hold that this is a pretty condescending remark, intimating that a person with little formal education can come up with anything resembling profundity (which by the way, it doesn't anyway). There may be a hint of sexism creeping in here as well.
Please do not, however, let these few quibbles put you off from reading the book. It really does belong in the modern classical cannon along with Kazanzakis, the writer he most reminds me of. I have ordered The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, both on the strength of my response to this book, and because it came even more highly recommended by my friend at Amazon. I'm really looking forward to reading it.
Rating: 5
Summary: A surprise! ...a page-turner with brains and soul...
Comment: For months I delayed cracking the cover of "Blindness." After all, based on the book's description, the white blindness at the center of the story was obviously an allegory for something or other, and Saramago won the Nobel Prize for literature. The two combined seemed a sure recipe for disaster, a guarantee that the book would be heavy-handed and awkward, top-heavy with political messages, and as wooden as a dime-store Indian.
But, lo! A surprise! Sure, blindness is an allegory; sure, the book is at times heavy-handed and awkward. But Saramago's passionate storytelling and aching humanity paces the book brilliantly. This is a page-turner with brains and soul, "Lord of the Flies" meets Virginia Woolf. If this book were a woman, she'd be a stunning organic farmer/carpenter with a mysterious past-a woman who drinks tea and bets the horses.
But I digress.
Saramago's prose structure, oft described as a handicap in reader reviews, is perfectly suitable to the novel. Saramago tosses quotes, names, and paragraph breaks overboard, which effectively throws a burlap sack over our reader's eyes, leaving us sightless in the midst of swirling, dangerous drama. You can hear voices, but you can't identify their origin. You can imagine your confines, but only after a serious amount of groping and blundering into sharp-edged objects.
But simultaneously, you are the doctor's wife's eyes, and you share her pain at being able to view the horror of the blindness. You witness the moral decrepitude of your fellow human being. You witness rape. You witness murder. You watch children crap all over themselves, and feel their burning humiliation.
Unlike "Lord of the Flies," even the most inhuman brutes in these troubled times show glorious rays of divinity. Even the big lug, the ringleader, displays his vital spark at the moment of his death-which occurs at the climax of a rape. The old woman who eats raw chickens and rabbits and leaves their bones scattered about the house like some fairy-book witch, is an object of pity rather than scorn, despite her vicious selfishness.
All in all, "Blindness" is a brilliant book. I plan to go out and read more of his work...
Rating: 3
Summary: Human Nature Exposed
Comment: A dark look at the core of human nature and the will to survive when stripped of a sense that is widely taken for granted. The book has many literal levels that are open to interpretation and is written with very little punctuation that is sometimes difficult to follow in dialogue-heavy areas. Overall, an interesting look at the breakdown of society when laws are obsolete and where only the strong survive.
 |
Title: All the Names by Jose Saramago, Margaret Costa ISBN: 0156010593 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 05 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago ISBN: 0156001411 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 28 September, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: The Cave by Jose Saramago, Margaret Costa ISBN: 0156028794 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 15 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago ISBN: 0156004011 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 14 June, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero ISBN: 0156005204 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 05 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
