Blindness

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After publication of the late Nobel Prize winner’s final novel, Cain, along comes the first English-language translation of this early work. While Lord of the Flies might seem an immediately similar reference, Saramaga's work has both more craft and more acuity than William Golding's tale. People fumbling around in the whiteness, hoping no one around means them harm and being powerless to do anything about it if they did.

He was later promoted to senior lecturer and finally Reader in Latin-American Literature in the Victoria University of Manchester until his retirement in 1995. Being raped by one man is bad enough, but when being raped by several men a woman has become an object, not even an object of desire, but merely a receptacle for lust. This woman becomes the “eyes” for her husband and the band of people placed in her ward, and she simultaneously becomes the “eyes” for the reader. The scenes that follow are extremely unpleasant to read, but at the same time they're so realistic that you can't be mad at Saramago for writing such severe events packed with violence that include rapes and murders. While he is mostly loyal to the doctor's wife, he helps the whole group by protecting them all from packs of dogs who are becoming increasingly feral.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. We only start to see that we do not see when we turn blind and there is a disruption in our unseeing complacency.

The power of this book was quite overwhelming at times and I had to stop reading for a few days at a time. The author here has created a society descending into complete ciaos but also has to take into account what would happen if everyone went suddenly blind. Subsequently, it was adapted for film and very recently for theatre showing at the Donmar Warehouse, London and starring Juliet Stevenson in their first post-lockdown piece of work. The government on the verge of panic rounds up all those infected in an attempt to contain the spread of the disease. The unanticipated and unforeseen events often strike us when we least expect them to, so much so that those could afflict you in the middle of a ride, which is still explicable.

It may have been written 23 years ago, but few works bar possibly Camus’ The Plague seem more immediately relevant in a world of Covid-19 lockdown. Her utter lack of action and sense of responsibility for the majority of the book almost made me quit reading. At first there are only a handful of people and then there are hundreds of people crammed into this facility.