Blindness

I usually don’t read fiction. I think I just don’t know how to appreciate it. Whenever I pick up a book of fiction, I just want to know what happens next and how it all ends. I ignore all the power of imagination that the writer has put into developing characters, details of events, and how the characters interact and think, etc. That is the beauty of the fiction and I just zoom through all that. So, when a good friend of mine suggested reading “Blindness”, a book by Jose Saramago, the 1998 Noble prize winner in literature, I kind of reluctantly picked it up, but was immediately drawn into it.

Saramago’s writing in this book has a unique style. All the characters’ conversations, thoughts, events, the writer’s own commentary, are all strung together in sentences, that flow like a stream, but so powerful and so clear that the reader feels caught up in the middle of it all. It makes the reader hear what the characters are saying and thinking, and experience the events with them.

The plot is also quite unique and strange. A contagious illness of sudden blindness spreads through the population quickly. This sudden disaster gives such a shock to the society that the normalcy of life goes away and everything starts to fall apart. Order is replaced by chaos, and the society goes toward a complete breakdown and disintegration. The survival instinct brings out the worst in the human beings, but in the middle of all the darkness and turmoil, you can still see traces of human sprit prevail, that which makes us different from instinct driven animals.

I highly recommend this book.