Blindness

      Blindness is a book about what happens when society is dissolved nearly instantly. Personally, I think that the concept of an epidemic of blindness is the best part of the book. Combined with Saramago's strange writing style it succeeds in creating a more chaotic atmosphere than any of the other books we have read. This is ironic because it also has the least physical destruction of any of the books we have read. A lot of cars crashed as a result of spontaneous blindness and every surface is quickly being covered in a layer of poop, but otherwise everything has been left alone. It is fitting because the focus of this book is not on larger society, but on the relations of smaller groups. First the group of a few hundred in the asylum and later an even smaller band of about ten people. I didn't like that aspect of the book at first, but I started to like it after the asylum had burnt down.   
     
      About the style. It was brutal. I had to read this book in very short spurts of 15 minutes at a time. The only other book I have read that was written like this is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude is also written with very long run-on sentences, but it does use quotations and paragraphs. I wonder if this is partly caused by tricky translation from the original languages. Maybe Blindness is a lot less harsh to read in its original Portuguese.

     Frankly, I had no idea what this book was all about or what Jose Saramago was trying to say. I know this book had a lot of statements about humanity and society and stuff but it all went over my head I guess. After I learned Saramago was a hard-core anarchist communist I really wished I had understood more of it. In the part of the book that takes place in the asylum Saramago seemed to take a very pessimistic view on humanity. This changes when the people being terrorized by the criminal element rise up together and revolt. This micro-revolution marks a redemption of the characters pride. From this point on the book becomes more optimistic. The smaller group led by the seeing woman may not be much better off materially, but the solidarity of the smaller collective gives them back their humanity. Saramago makes the fundamentally anarchist point that small groups based on affinity are far superior to the kind of forced collectivity of the asylum. At least I understood that part.