Blindness by Jose Saramago

Okay, for once in a long while I can honestly say I read something that did not live up to my expectations.

Perhaps having recently read Camus's The Plague made me desensitized to the contagious outbreak/quarantine aspects of this story, because in this story I found them to be agonizingly drawn out. Yes, of course the government is going to round everybody up into camps of horrible conditions, of course they are going to say it is for their own good, of course it won't be, of course members of the government will start getting sick themselves, blah blah. Standard. But.

Let me back up. Blindness's strengths lie in the nature of the outbreak, which is one of (you guessed it!) blindness. A strange blindness where the afflicted can only perceive a "milky sea of white." Naturally, this white blindness was described repeatedly throughout the book, which felt repetitive and sometimes annoyed me. I was very interested in the bigger picture of a blindness epidemic, but Saramago focused on a small group of individuals reacting to the outbreak. It's not his fault he didn't give me what I wanted, and he's not a poor writer because of it, but I certainly felt unsatisfied when I was done with the book.

It opens very strongly, though - the sudden and inexplicable appearance of a medically unknown type of blindess is described effectively, stunningly, and quite beautifully. As the instances of blindness increase, a quarantine is established, and all the blind (or exposed to blind) people are sent to a facility that used to be an insane asylum. This I found to be unnecessarily overt thematic foreshadowing, why not a mere abandoned hospital? I'm not so stupid that I don't understand quarantined people, especially blind ones, will eventually display myriad types of insanity. Anyway.

Our plot focuses around one woman, the wife of the opthamologist who examined the very first person to go blind. After the first blind man visited the opthamologist's office, the doctor goes blind himself. As he is being loaded into the ambulance that will undoubtedly take him to the quarantine, his wife lies and says she, as well, has been striken with the illness. She never does, however, go blind, and she becomes the vehicle for exploring the disintegration of society. She is, literally, the only one who can see it.

Saramago's style of dialogue is dense. There is almost constant dialogue - many nameless characters are speaking, and their declarations are separated only by commas. There are few paragraph breaks, as well, so every chapter feels relentless. This is very effective in conveying a sense of blindness - tracking the speaker of the dialogue is practically as difficult for the reader as it is for the blind, and all the characters are reduced to little more than disembodied voices calling out repetitive phrases and worries.

I'm not sure what else to really say about this book. It was certainly interesting - I was never bored while reading it, and the thought of -everyone- being blind is much more terrifying than I initially gave it credit for. There are, ironically, very intense visuals that I retain from the story, and it definitely made an impact on me. However, there was just something missing that made it hard for me to completely engage with the story or the characters.

I have the feeling that, over time, this will seem like a much better book than it seemed when I first completed it. I just wanted to write about it now, while it's still fresh in my mind. Maybe I'll come back to it as I process it. Or at least when I'm not frantically writing during my lunch break. Ha ha.