![]() ![]() It is her ordinariness and her compassion which grounds the story and adds a glimmer of hope to what sometimes seems like relentless darkness.īlindness is one of those rare books that crawled inside my head and has stayed with me for years after I read it. We see the story unfold through the eyes of a middle-aged woman known in the book only as ‘the doctor’s wife’. The struggle to survive creates (or amplifies) a secondary mental blindness, where few of the characters can envision a future beyond managing their own immediate, physical needs. With no one able to see, the unnamed characters in Blindness are plunged into a world where the strong exploit the weak, and even the most basic social mores are lost. Here, the Government’s regulatory control is impotently bureaucratic. Saramago’s dystopic vision is that scrutiny is non-existent. ![]() If Orwell’s 1984 was the horror of the panopticon, of always being watched, then Blindness is the opposite. What follows is a riveting portrayal of the best and worst of human nature. One moment a man waits in his car at the traffic lights, the next his world has dissolved to white. ![]() It comes without fanfare, pain, or warning. An illness spreads through an unnamed city. ![]()
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