Luís's Reviews > Ensaio sobre a Cegueira

"Blindness" is the most captivating novel I have read in a long time, but also the one I closed with the most generous relief. It's an oppressive and nauseating atmosphere. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps!
Imagine a pandemic that, in a few weeks, strikes blindness to the population as a whole! The extraordinary and brutal dimension of the cataclysm prevents the establishment of any saving organization and generates absolute chaos.
Without water or electricity, the blind wander in disparate groups for scarce food in ransacked stores daily. The most vulnerable people die in the street amid abandoned cars and droppings. The still-hot corpses fall prey to starving dogs, enormous rats, and scavenging birds.
The reader accompanies ten people who are the first victims of the scourge that will quarantine them. In their misfortune, they have the unexpected luck of having a woman who can still see among them. Out of prudence, the latter pretends to be blind, and only her husband, an ophthalmologist, is aware of this happy anomaly of fate.
With "Blindness," published in 1995, the future Nobel Prize winner José Saramago creates an incredibly realistic fiction in which bestiality quickly precedes all humanity. Fortunately, the doctor's wife's altruistic behavior and intelligence somewhat attenuate the darkness!
This fiction's strangeness must be accentuated by the Portuguese writer's particular syntax in which the comma is queen.
Glued continuously to the basques of the protagonists in their groping movements, the reader, stunned by the apocalyptic degree of the intrigue, will do so until the end. That's round-eyed.