Word: saramago
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...Number of extra copies of Jose Saramago's novel Blindness printed after he won the Nobel for Literature last year, up from...
...Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago's most recent novel, Blindness, tells the horrifying story of an epidemic of blindness that spreads across the world, destroying families, social institutions and, eventually, every shred of recognizable civilization. The blindness begins when one man is suddenly and inexplicably struck with a strange, dazzling white blindness. Helplessly seeking to find an explanation and cure, the man infects everyone he meets. The blindness does not discern between good and evil--it infects a car thief as easily as a doctor, a prostitute as easily as a child...
...Saramago expertly crafts this intricate and horrifying allegory with a style as striking as it is sparse. The language is never intricate, extremely metaphorical or descriptive; rather, Saramago relies on the sharp edge of spare, pointed prose to pierce the fragile shells of human decency and social stability. Images of rape and death are told with the same distanced tone as scenes of strength and love, melding tone and image into a grand, constant conglomerate of uncomfortable fear and hopelessness...
...characters are never given names, an obvious choice on Saramago's part to emphasize the slightly ridiculous nature of the idea that humans are distinct. Individuality crumbles when self-survival becomes the primary objective and everyone eventually realizes that, at their core, they are profoundly, horribly, the same. "Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are," one inmate claims with horror. Saramago's use of dialogue mirrors this loss of individuality. The words of the blind meld together without paragraphs, quotation marks or periods. Separated only by commas, the statements of the blind...
Behind the absorbing plot and images, Saramago crafts a profoundly cynical allegory for the condition of humanityand the fragility of the comforts we take forgranted. At the root of the story is not anexplanation for humanity's existence or diagrammeddirections on how to live virtuously: Saramago isnot constructing a sermon on the merits ofobservant, moral living and rational governments.Rather, at the heart of the novel lies a deeplydisturbing hunch that perhaps, in the end, life isblind. We depend on life having a purpose, adirection. The truly disturbing question Saramagoposes is, what if life really means nothing? Thisquestion...