Blindness
On recommendation from a dear friend, i read Blindness by José Saramago.
It felt ironic to read a book about blindness. At one point i was reading in the sun & when i looked away from the pages, white dots blurred my vision. Creepy.
This is an exciting book to read. At its beginning, the mundane is refocused through experimental narrative means. Dialog (internal & external) is separated by comma marks & while it is not always certain who among the characters or omniscient narrator are speaking, at those points it doesn't matter. This device increased my association with the characters; i too felt i was reading a book while blind.
The story begins with a man sitting in his car in traffic, waiting for the light to change. For some reason i placed the setting in modern England but aside from the mention of certain pieces of technology, there were few cultural references. No doubt the author hoped this story could be universal & timeless. Horns begin to blare in traffic, drivers have gotten out of their car to pound on the windows of an unmoving obstruction in the road. The man inside repeats the same three words over & over: "I am blind".
A man offers to drive the blind man home & all the witnesses are ready to turn that poor man into an anecdote about their days. The kind stranger escorts the blind man home, takes him to his apartment door, & asks if the blind man would like company while he waits for his wife to return (the blind man did not want to go to the hospital; he wanted to complete the task of going home). At this point the blind man gets suspicious & asks the stranger to leave. The stranger leaves, with the blind man's car keys & steals his car. That was one of the most poignant parts of the story for me. The blindness is not dark, but an all-encompassing bright whiteness. The wife of the blind man comes home & schedules an appointment with an ophthalmologist: the first because neither of them have ever worn glasses.
The ophthalmologist is perplexed, he can find nothing wrong with the blind man's eyes, but he orders some tests to keep the blind man busy while he thinks it over.
The doctor treats the rest of his patients for the day & then goes home. His wife goes to bed while he continues studying his books, looking for an explanation for the blind man's condition. While studying, he goes blind.
I think that was one of my favorite parts about this book: the descriptions of when & how the characters are struck blind by this quick-spreading epidemic. A woman with dark glasses sees everything white as one of her johns gives her an orgasm. The car thief goes blind just after he forgives himself for his crime, & a commander who thinks all the infected should be exterminated shoots himself after he has gone blind. A voice in the story calls him "consistent". Suddenly every ordinary task is afforded a special reverence because it may be the last task your eyes see.
At the onset of the epidemic, the army rounds up anyone infected & interns them in a quarantine that used to be a sanitarium. Another vicious point in the book is the listing of rules read by an officer over a loudspeaker. This, & the woman with dark glasses' orgasm into fate are two of the most crafted parts of the book.
The characters in the quarantine decide to forgo names. Instead, they provide short descriptors for themselves. There is the first blind man & his wife, the doctor & the doctor's wife, the woman with dark glasses, a woman with insomnia, a boy with a squint, an old man with an eyepatch. People reduced & somehow illuminated. Eventually it is revealed to the reader that the doctor's wife had never lost her sight, but faked it to stay with her husband. She is a practical voice attempting reason through the story. She is the only person who packed a proper suitcase which proves useful & helps to guide the other internees without revealing her secret.
The Quarantine is a predictably cruel & treacherous place that depicts human weaknesses & vulnerabilities. The military is so afraid of catching the illness that they threaten to shoot anyone who attempts to leave the compound. They offer no medical supplies & often forget to bring food & rarely bring enough for the number of people who are actually there.
As the epidemic spreads, the compound is filled to capacity with increasingly desperate & panicked people. A group of ruffians make ill matters worse when one smuggles in a gun & forms a gang to play with power. They steal all the food & enjoy a temporary lordship over weeping souls. Their power is short lived & the compound burns to the ground. When the survivors wander outside, they find they have been abandoned by the military officers.
One point i forgot to mention in the book was how attractive the woman with dark glasses was registered to be. She has some naivety about it: the confidence of a person who's always been wanted so never thought what it would be like otherwise. Even when the people are blind, she feels curvy & her manner attracts others to her. One night while the doctor's wife cannot sleep she stands to check on the other people in the compound & she watches her husband stand up & go to the cot of the woman with dark glasses. She watches them have sex & feels sorry for them. The woman with dark glasses preaches compassion & innocence even though she is a sexual creature. I think sex for her is a way of trying to heal someone else. She is a bit of a Cassandra figure: raped by a god & speaking truth from the nonsense of truth.
The small group of characters become a family & leave the compound in search of a place to live. My favorite character, the dog of tears, joins the group along the way. I wonder what this story would be like if written from the perspective of dogs or if all the characters were dogs. (The animals did not go blind, btw.)
Story snapshots: trudging through streets covered in excrement, dead bodies & trash. The doctor's wife feeling her way down the basement stairs to a grocery storage, being afraid of the dark, filling her bags, closing the door when she leaves.
The traditional blind man who reads Braille in the internment compound.
The old woman who survives by killing rabbits & hens & eating their raw meat. How she let the animals out of their cages before she died with a set of keys in her hand. How the animals pecked at her anyway.
The writer living in the first blind couple's flat. His "inappropriate for the moment" words & his manuscript.
Waiting, waiting, waiting for the doctor's wife to go blind.
The praise written on the outside cover referred to this as "an important book." I'm not sure about that. Perhaps the hypothetical are important to consider when weighing human social interaction & the philosophy of our survival. The talented experiment of the narrative style is certainly impressive & i hope would urge writers to write "outside the box" or outside of one's eyes in this case. I wonder about the crutch of the one woman who could see within this world of blind people.
The book thumps you on the head with the axiom of "The more i can see, the more blind i am". There is also the metaphysical notion of "The more others cannot see me, the more blind i become." Unfortunately i did not read this book in its native language. Even more unfortunately, the translator died before completing a final revision. I suspect that a good deal of eloquence was not properly translated. Unfortunately the allegories were among the poor translation, robbing this story of its overall epiphany moment. Without cultural subtext i can only guess at what is meant by "blindness" & "seeing".
In a book where humans are stripped so keenly i expected to find more truth. I assume it is generally accepted that infected persons are ostracized & cast out, that humans fear what they do not understand & hate what they fear, & that governments are only organized in our own image so that if our image should suffer such a drastic change, government collapses unless being about to negotiate that change. All of these things i expected in a story about an epidemic, the events seemed almost obvious & familiar.
Perhaps what i really missed in the book was ornate construction. Most of the story proceeds in dialog & modern citizens are notoriously unprofound when speaking to each other. But what binds me to a book is an author's way of describing instances in a way that depends entirely on them: a moment created that could have been achieved no other way than by that exact design & course of events. I agree that this magic could have been lost in translation, for i gobbled the book but finished it unsatisfied. There is a particular tweaking Beauty needs in order to deliver a slap in the face. This book never slapped me but gave me the chance to think about things that deserve forefront attention for the sake of now-and-then perspective.
How would you prepare if the world went blind?
It felt ironic to read a book about blindness. At one point i was reading in the sun & when i looked away from the pages, white dots blurred my vision. Creepy.
This is an exciting book to read. At its beginning, the mundane is refocused through experimental narrative means. Dialog (internal & external) is separated by comma marks & while it is not always certain who among the characters or omniscient narrator are speaking, at those points it doesn't matter. This device increased my association with the characters; i too felt i was reading a book while blind.
The story begins with a man sitting in his car in traffic, waiting for the light to change. For some reason i placed the setting in modern England but aside from the mention of certain pieces of technology, there were few cultural references. No doubt the author hoped this story could be universal & timeless. Horns begin to blare in traffic, drivers have gotten out of their car to pound on the windows of an unmoving obstruction in the road. The man inside repeats the same three words over & over: "I am blind".
A man offers to drive the blind man home & all the witnesses are ready to turn that poor man into an anecdote about their days. The kind stranger escorts the blind man home, takes him to his apartment door, & asks if the blind man would like company while he waits for his wife to return (the blind man did not want to go to the hospital; he wanted to complete the task of going home). At this point the blind man gets suspicious & asks the stranger to leave. The stranger leaves, with the blind man's car keys & steals his car. That was one of the most poignant parts of the story for me. The blindness is not dark, but an all-encompassing bright whiteness. The wife of the blind man comes home & schedules an appointment with an ophthalmologist: the first because neither of them have ever worn glasses.
The ophthalmologist is perplexed, he can find nothing wrong with the blind man's eyes, but he orders some tests to keep the blind man busy while he thinks it over.
The doctor treats the rest of his patients for the day & then goes home. His wife goes to bed while he continues studying his books, looking for an explanation for the blind man's condition. While studying, he goes blind.
I think that was one of my favorite parts about this book: the descriptions of when & how the characters are struck blind by this quick-spreading epidemic. A woman with dark glasses sees everything white as one of her johns gives her an orgasm. The car thief goes blind just after he forgives himself for his crime, & a commander who thinks all the infected should be exterminated shoots himself after he has gone blind. A voice in the story calls him "consistent". Suddenly every ordinary task is afforded a special reverence because it may be the last task your eyes see.
At the onset of the epidemic, the army rounds up anyone infected & interns them in a quarantine that used to be a sanitarium. Another vicious point in the book is the listing of rules read by an officer over a loudspeaker. This, & the woman with dark glasses' orgasm into fate are two of the most crafted parts of the book.
The characters in the quarantine decide to forgo names. Instead, they provide short descriptors for themselves. There is the first blind man & his wife, the doctor & the doctor's wife, the woman with dark glasses, a woman with insomnia, a boy with a squint, an old man with an eyepatch. People reduced & somehow illuminated. Eventually it is revealed to the reader that the doctor's wife had never lost her sight, but faked it to stay with her husband. She is a practical voice attempting reason through the story. She is the only person who packed a proper suitcase which proves useful & helps to guide the other internees without revealing her secret.
The Quarantine is a predictably cruel & treacherous place that depicts human weaknesses & vulnerabilities. The military is so afraid of catching the illness that they threaten to shoot anyone who attempts to leave the compound. They offer no medical supplies & often forget to bring food & rarely bring enough for the number of people who are actually there.
As the epidemic spreads, the compound is filled to capacity with increasingly desperate & panicked people. A group of ruffians make ill matters worse when one smuggles in a gun & forms a gang to play with power. They steal all the food & enjoy a temporary lordship over weeping souls. Their power is short lived & the compound burns to the ground. When the survivors wander outside, they find they have been abandoned by the military officers.
One point i forgot to mention in the book was how attractive the woman with dark glasses was registered to be. She has some naivety about it: the confidence of a person who's always been wanted so never thought what it would be like otherwise. Even when the people are blind, she feels curvy & her manner attracts others to her. One night while the doctor's wife cannot sleep she stands to check on the other people in the compound & she watches her husband stand up & go to the cot of the woman with dark glasses. She watches them have sex & feels sorry for them. The woman with dark glasses preaches compassion & innocence even though she is a sexual creature. I think sex for her is a way of trying to heal someone else. She is a bit of a Cassandra figure: raped by a god & speaking truth from the nonsense of truth.
The small group of characters become a family & leave the compound in search of a place to live. My favorite character, the dog of tears, joins the group along the way. I wonder what this story would be like if written from the perspective of dogs or if all the characters were dogs. (The animals did not go blind, btw.)
Story snapshots: trudging through streets covered in excrement, dead bodies & trash. The doctor's wife feeling her way down the basement stairs to a grocery storage, being afraid of the dark, filling her bags, closing the door when she leaves.
The traditional blind man who reads Braille in the internment compound.
The old woman who survives by killing rabbits & hens & eating their raw meat. How she let the animals out of their cages before she died with a set of keys in her hand. How the animals pecked at her anyway.
The writer living in the first blind couple's flat. His "inappropriate for the moment" words & his manuscript.
Waiting, waiting, waiting for the doctor's wife to go blind.
The praise written on the outside cover referred to this as "an important book." I'm not sure about that. Perhaps the hypothetical are important to consider when weighing human social interaction & the philosophy of our survival. The talented experiment of the narrative style is certainly impressive & i hope would urge writers to write "outside the box" or outside of one's eyes in this case. I wonder about the crutch of the one woman who could see within this world of blind people.
The book thumps you on the head with the axiom of "The more i can see, the more blind i am". There is also the metaphysical notion of "The more others cannot see me, the more blind i become." Unfortunately i did not read this book in its native language. Even more unfortunately, the translator died before completing a final revision. I suspect that a good deal of eloquence was not properly translated. Unfortunately the allegories were among the poor translation, robbing this story of its overall epiphany moment. Without cultural subtext i can only guess at what is meant by "blindness" & "seeing".
In a book where humans are stripped so keenly i expected to find more truth. I assume it is generally accepted that infected persons are ostracized & cast out, that humans fear what they do not understand & hate what they fear, & that governments are only organized in our own image so that if our image should suffer such a drastic change, government collapses unless being about to negotiate that change. All of these things i expected in a story about an epidemic, the events seemed almost obvious & familiar.
Perhaps what i really missed in the book was ornate construction. Most of the story proceeds in dialog & modern citizens are notoriously unprofound when speaking to each other. But what binds me to a book is an author's way of describing instances in a way that depends entirely on them: a moment created that could have been achieved no other way than by that exact design & course of events. I agree that this magic could have been lost in translation, for i gobbled the book but finished it unsatisfied. There is a particular tweaking Beauty needs in order to deliver a slap in the face. This book never slapped me but gave me the chance to think about things that deserve forefront attention for the sake of now-and-then perspective.
How would you prepare if the world went blind?