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Blindness

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In Blindness by Jose Saramago, authortells us the story of a mysterious mass plague of blindness that affects nearly everyone living in an unnamed place in a never specified time and the implications this epidemic has on people’s lives. Director Fernando Meirelles had wanted to direct a film adaptation in 1997, perceiving it as "an allegory about the fragility of civilization". Honeycutt criticized the film's two viewpoints: Julianne Moore's character, the only one who can see, is slow to act against atrocities, and the behavior of Danny Glover's character comes off as "slightly pompous". The “dog of tears” is an unusually human-like dog who joins the fledgling family led by the doctor’s wife. But for Jull Costa, its strength is in his "writing so humanely about ordinary people and their predicaments".

Still a Communist party member, Saramago describes himself as a "hormonal communist - just as there's a hormone that makes my beard grow every day. Saramago wrote a sequel to Blindness in 2004, titled Seeing ( Ensaio sobre a lucidez, literal English translation Essay on lucidity), which has also been translated into English. Meirelles ascribed the problem to a rape scene that takes place partway through the film, and edited the scene to be much shorter in the final cut. One of the doctor’s patients, a young woman wearing dark glasses for an eye infection, works as a prostitute and goes blind while having sex with a man at a hotel.At these points, the lack of sight is disorienting and the Ringhams’ binaural sound design properly takes effect as the violence of the piece crawls beneath your skin. One of the newcomers is another patient of the doctor’s, an old man with a black eyepatch who tells the others about the sad state of the city: the Government has failed to control the epidemic, and an escalating series of catastrophes followed. The struggle of the individual against bureaucracy and anonymity is one of the great subjects of modern literature, and Saramago is often matched with Kafka as one of its premier exponents.

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. Moore described her character's responsibility: "Her biggest concern in the beginning is simply her husband. More patients arrive, including the first blind man’s wife and various minor characters who have briefly interacted with the protagonists (like the taxi-driver who drove the first blind man and his wife to the doctor).

It feels as if Stevenson is whispering right into your ear, stroking your arm, holding that dripping knife. Two different police officers escort the car-thief and the girl with the dark glasses back to their respective homes. São Paulo served as the primary backdrop for Blindness, as it is a city mostly unfamiliar to North American and European audiences.

The entire hospital ends up catching fire, and the patients run outside, only to find that the soldiers are gone—in fact, the whole city is eerily silent and dark. The doctor’s wife realizes she alone can stop the thugs, so she secretly surveys their ward at night. Justin Chang of Variety described the film: " Blindness emerges onscreen both overdressed and undermotivated, scrupulously hitting the novel's beats yet barely approximating, so to speak, its vision. For Saramago, democracy was in need of regeneration, since economic power determines political power.When the film ended, Saramago was in tears, and said: "Fernando, I am as happy to have seen this movie as I was the day I finished the book. The man in the hotel is “an old acquaintance” of the girl with the dark glasses who enlists her services as a prostitute on the night that the girl goes blind. The novel's translation in 1988 as Baltasar and Blimunda, by the late Giovanni Pontiero, brought Saramago to the English-speaking world, and it was turned into an opera in 1990. Throughout Blindness, Saramago’s characters struggle to understand what has happened to them and their city. And finally, because her lone figure, there in the box, surrounded by emptiness and absence on every side, as if she inhabited a void, seemed to be the expression of the most absolute solitude.

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