Blindness

This was a tough one to rate. Giving only three stars to a Nobel Prize winner definitely feels like I'm doing something wrong. But this might just be a case of a book being well done, but not quite for me. I'll start with what I liked.

Let me start with what I liked. The premise is immediately thought-provoking on a practical level. The prospect of blindness transmitting through the population like a pandemic is terrifying, and Saramago does a good job of immediately emphasizing the fragility of civilization as the condition spreads. He successfully demonstrates that it does not take long for basic tenets of human dignity to disappear, including sanitation, privacy, safety, access to food and medicine, and respect for others. It was extremely dark and gritty, but believable.

The premise also works well as the allegory it is meant to be, with the physical condition of blindness representing our blindness to human suffering and the injustice of the social order. The character of the doctor’s wife forces us to question our own responsibility when we have the ability to see what others cannot. Where does that already apply in our own lives? The other characters force us to ask what kind of person we would become if the usual systems of visibility, shame, and accountability were to disappear.

I also appreciated a lot of the stylistic elements. The lack of any actual names made a lot of sense with the theme of blindness. The same goes for the weird grammatical style with limited punctuation. I listened to this as I read it, so I barely noticed the run-on sentences. It all sounded pretty natural when read aloud, but still added to the feeling of chaos and claustrophobia of the narrative.

So why only three stars? Maybe my expectations were too high, but it all ended up feeling weirdly elementary. There is nothing subtle or particularly clever about the metaphor on display, and maybe I wanted there to be something deeper? It's pretty heavy-handed. But I also suspect that a big part of the simplistic feel of the book comes from the translation. To me, some of the language and phrasing felt awkward or flattened in English, like it was an obvious translation. Maybe I would have had a different experience if I was capable of reading it in the original Portuguese.

There were also certain elements of the book that just did not click for me. What was supposed to be the message of the doctor randomly sleeping with the woman with the dark glasses? Maybe it was meant to show that even the more morally decent characters lose their sense of right and wrong under those conditions? I also thought it was strange how little attention was given to the boy with the squint, since he was the only child in the story. It felt like the presence of children in a scenario like this was too significant not to at least be acknowledged, but then it was too complicated to fully explore.

Book author: José Saramago