Saramago, José: Blindness
Blindness
Writer: José Saramago
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 293
This book nabbed my attention ever since the movie trailers for the film adaptation hit the airwaves. I never got around to the movie, even though the premise intrigued me, so I decided to give the book a go. That, at least, would satisfy my curiosity. Better still, digitalclone wanted to read this for our December challenge, so it gave me a good excuse to give in and buy a copy.
The premise: this speculative fiction tale asks the simple question, "What if everyone went blind?" Blindness is treated like a contagion, with the book opening with the first blind man, and how the blindness follows those the man comes in contact with. Better still, the blindness is question isn't actually darkness, but rather an unrelenting white light. Fearful of a disease they do not understand and can only hope to contain, the government quarantines all of those who are blind. But one woman lied in order to stay with her husband, and it's through her eyes we witness how a blind society is formed and how humanity falls apart, as well as what means to hold on to hope in such a hopeless situation.
Spoilers.
digitalclone started reading (and for that matter, she finished this) before I did, and she warned me that the punctuation is anything but traditional. I'm used to reading authors who think that proper punctuation is a suggestion instead of a rule, like Charles Frazier and Cormac McCarthy, but I can't help but think it's a good thing that I had a warning with this one. Normally, Saramago's style would've pissed me off, but since I knew it was coming, I could read with patience.
And just what does he do?
First off, he does not name his characters. They are known by descriptions: the first blind man, the first blind man's wife, the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with the dark glasses, the boy with the squint, etc. There is also, toward the end of the book, the dog of tears, which is so freaking awesome I want to hug every sentence with that phrase in it.
You would think that this lack of naming makes for some confusing reading, and it does, if you're trying to read too fast, but for the most part, it works. It adds to the overall mythic feel to the book and its premise. Normally generalities take away from the realism of the book, but that's not the case here. Saramago so captures the human condition that each character becomes an "every man" or "every woman" or "any government," and that's a fantastic accomplishment.
The second thing he does is writes without any quotation marks. And how he does it is almost worse than Frazier or McCarthy, because here, we've got entire paragraphs of exposition and dialogue mixed together, and often the dialogue between two or more people is all mashed together in the same paragraph, often with only a comma and/or a capital letter to signify a change in speaker. Should you read slowly? Yes. Will you have to re-read sections just to figure them out? Most likely. But does it work? Amazingly, yes.
What makes it work is right from the get-go, Saramago creates a specific rhythm and cadence with his prose, and it's so consuming that the formatting of the dialogue just fits right into that rhythm. Once you know it's coming, it's almost easy to pick out the dialogue from the narrative, and it becomes a joy to read because it feels so easy despite the fact it looks difficult.
I heard that Saramago uses this same technique with his other books. Kind of a shame, because at least here, writing about a group of people who've lost their sight, the formatting is almost an imitation. Who needs to follow proper grammar and formatting when you can't see it anyway? It's kind of poetic like that, and while I have no idea if that was Saramago's intention (the English is a translation), it's a lovely thought to entertain.
Thirdly, we have a very distinct omniscient narrator. There's more than the voices of the blind and the doctor's wife who can see all, there's the narrator's commentary, the narrator who whisks us from POV to POV and shows us what's happening. I'm not usually fond of the omniscient narrator, but here, I'll make an exception. It's well done.
But all of this requires the reader to sit down and SLOW down and take their time reading. Because there are often times the sentences feel jumbled, or something reads as a contradiction to something you already know, or you're just not sure what's going on and who's speaking to who or if it's a thought instead. But the reading itself is not a chore. It's a delight in a way, which is good, because the content is so damn SAD and depressing.
There is never an explanation for the blindness, nor is their an explanation for the sudden regaining of sight. Both occur in a snap, without any word of warning, and normally this would bother the crap out of me, as well would the doctor's wife's immunity (see A Brief History of the Dead), but as I mentioned before, the focus is so un-unerringly human that you can't help but put aside the larger question of why. Instead, you focus on the characters and the real struggle to survive. It's heartbreaking, and not just for the doctor's wife who must not only act as a witness, but must also carry the burden of what the blind are becoming. The moments where she witnesses her husband make love to the girl with the dark glasses is emotionally frustrating as it is surreal, and the food crisis is just painful for all that it leads to. Often, I wanted the doctor's wife to throw off her anonymity and claim her sight so that no one else could take over, but in hindsight, I'm not so sure how that would've prevented the disaster in the asylum. She would've been used by the hoodlums, and likely raped more over than she'd already been. And where she hesitates in killing the man with the gun for the first time, she doesn't when she gets a second chance, and that payoff alone is worth the reading forward.
The conflict between the inmates was sharp and immediate, as well as the outside threat of the soldiers. Oddly, I lost a little interest when it became known that the soldiers had abandoned their post and that the whole city (world?) was blind, and that the doctor's wife and her "family" of the blind went into the city to survive. No doubt, seeing Saramago's depiction of humanity was enthralling, but I kept wondering just how it would end, and only came to the conclusion that people would regain their sight because I read the summary for the sequel, Seeing. However, before doing that, I felt the book would end with the doctor's wife finally going blind, which I supposed would've been a rather hopeless ending, but an interesting one.
My Rating
Worth the Cash: so even though I haven't seen the movie, I'm kind of glad I got to the book first. I know many people feel like the source material should always be experienced first, but I'm the kind of girl that tends to turn to the adaptation to see if the material interests me enough to go to the original book. Sometimes, that plan backfires, and I'll wish I read the book first. I won't know if that'll be the case for Blindness, but I suspect this is one of those cases where it's better to have read the book first. I had the visuals from the trailer in my head, and that was enough to allow me to really enjoy and focus on the beauty of Saramago's prose instead of trying to speed through material I was already familiar with. I still want to see the movie, but in the meantime, I found an author worth revisiting. This book is definitely worth checking out, particularly for fans of literary SF, and trust me, this book is beyond literary. It's no wonder its author won the Nobel.
Next up:
The Gift by Richard Paul Evans