What’s worse than blindness? Worldwide blindness. — #77
On the harrowing beauty of Blindness by Jose Saramago
I recently read Blindness by Jose Saramago. I can’t remember how I stumbled across it in the first place. Possibly eBay. Regardless of how I found it, I’m glad that I did.
(I’ll come back to my eBay book browsing habit in another post.)
The prose in this novel was incredibly dense and claustrophobic; page-long paragraphs, speech not encapsulated with quote marks, the speakers’ words only separated by commas.
It was very easy to lose track of who was speaking in some of the longer interchanges. But this all seemed incredibly apt given the context of the story and a worldwide contagion of “white blindness”. We are not given an overt explanation for the blindness, but we do not need one. The analysis of humanity under these new conditions of worldwide blindness is harrowing.
I found out after I had read it that a film adaption had been made of the film back in 2008 starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. It is rated 18 and, given the contents of the novel, this is not surprising. From what I can make out from the trailer, it seems as if the film was a pretty faithful rendering of the original story. But I think I’ll keep the visualisation of the story inside by brain for now.
The novel was harrowing enough. I don’t think I need to live through it on a TV screen!
