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Posted 20 hours ago

Blindness

£9.9£99Clearance
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The power of this book was quite overwhelming at times and I had to stop reading for a few days at a time. Whatever one’s feelings about José Saramago’s dystopian nightmare Blindness, you have to acknowledge its staying power. This ward extorts valuables from the other internees in exchange for food and, when the "goods" (such as bracelets and watches run out) they begin to rape the women. Their existence has been suspended between being and nothingness, as if it doesn’t matter to those who are still considered civilized, but yet to be thrown in the hell of nothingness.

We never do learn any of their names as if their identities have escaped them with their loss of vision. It's written in huge blocks of text with little punctuation, no quotation marks, and many run-on sentences. It/he/she/they shift from third person omniscient, to third person limited, to first person seemingly present in the scene, to first person removed and either omniscient or limited, to first person plural all of the above. Initial attempts to hastily quarantine the blind in an abandoned mental hospital fail to contain the spread. To complicate things further, an armed clique acquires control and power, forcing the subjugated to pay for food in any way they can.For me there were too many miraculous occurrences in it, which kind of destroyed the credibility at times ,but all told I'd give it a thumbs up and recommend it for those with an interest in modern fiction. All of the internees are asked to bring all their valuables to be assessed and traded for food and water.

The lack of quotation marks around dialogue means that the speakers' identities (or the fact that dialogue is occurring) may not be immediately apparent to the reader. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing.

Few definite identifiers of culture are given, which contributes an element of timelessness and universality to the novel.

The double motif, which has fascinated authors as diverse as Poe, Dostoyevski and Nabokov, is revived in this surprisingly listless novel by Portuguese master Saramago.

An opthamologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.

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