Blindness is a great novel by Portuguese writer José Saramago that deals with human's individual and collective reactions when in the face of adversarial forces. I finished this work of masterpiece and I let it to sink in a little bit before reviewing it. The power of this book was quite overwhelming and astounding at times and I had to stop reading for a few days at a time. I do not think there are many books that afflicted and disturbed me like this one. Maybe “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, but there the message was much more deep and subtle. Some say that the structure of the book makes it very difficult to read. But I suppose the voice in my head did quite a good job in reading it as I did not encounter any difficulty to follow the narration. What made it hard to read at times were the images and smells that were projected and inflicted into my brain. At some point it seemed that human waste odour was rising from the pages in front of me. The plot is about one day people start to go blind without any prior symptoms. Frightened, the Government tries to restrain the blindness epidemic by isolating and locking the blind people into a mental institution. The quarantine is not successful and more and more people go blind day after day. The book focuses on the life of a few "patients" locked and guarded into a mental institution, among who lives the only person immune to blindness. The person is wife of doctor. She goes to the mental institution to help her husband. As the world goes blind the wife of the doctor is left unaffected. She continues to help where she can, but is reluctant to let everyone know she can see. She would be a slave to the group if they ever found out she could still see. She breaks out with a group of people all identified by their past professions or by some other identifying marker. We never do learn any of their names as if their identities have escaped them with their loss of vision. The loss of sight reduces people to their primal instincts (good or bad) and soon we are witnesses of some unimaginable horrors in the fight for food for supremacy for life and to the demise of all social and moral institutions. However, there are people that still try to help and to keep a bit of humanity and decency. “If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.” I thought that the book is a metaphor of the people that are walking through life without thinking about the violence and cruelty that is in front of them, their ignorance of anything that could threaten to their civilized life. I believe the book brings forward our fear and avoidance to see our mortality and the insignificance of our lives. “I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.” “Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.” “This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice.” You think everything is possible. You think everything possible must already exist. You think again of something you already believe: that people read the books that find them. That stories arrive to tell themselves, as relevant as news. A little King, a little Camus, a little Gabriel Garcia: which is to say Blindness is a lot of everything.

KörlükJosé Saramago · Kırmızı Kedi · 2022103,8bin okunma

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