It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. Blindness ( Portuguese: Ensaio sobre a cegueira, meaning Essay on Blindness) is a 1995 novel by the Portuguese author José Saramago. It is one of Saramago's most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. In 1998, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Blindness was one of his works noted by the committee when announcing the award. [1] This fiction's strangeness must accentuate by the Portuguese writer's particular syntax in which the comma is queen. José Saramago (1922–2010 ), one of Portugal’s most famous writers, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988. His novel Blindness is considered one of his most outstanding literary achievements. A speculative parable reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Plague, Blindness examines the reasons for a mysterious social and moral breakdown in a typical modern city. Saramago’s narrative uses the literal blindness of almost all the inhabitants of his city as a political, psychological, and spiritual metaphor.

blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone."Blindness is more than a dystopian novel, it is a philosophical work that makes us wonder about our way of living. Moreover, it brings forth the horrifying truth of how the loss of only one sense can almost instantly dismantle our society, our civilization crumbles to nothing. People are reduced to living in unimaginable filth and rummaging for food and water like animals. Film adaptation: there is a good film by Fernando Meirelles also called Blindness starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Gael García Bernal, released in 2008. While this adaptation isn't as graphic and visceral as Saramago's novel, it's still worth seeing. It is said that Saramago was in tears when the movie ended and said to director Meirelles: "Fernando, I am so happy to have seen this movie. I am as happy as I was the day I finished the book." Just imagine that you are going about your daily life as you always do. It's a normal day; nothing out of the ordinary. But then, suddenly, without any forewarning, you go completely blind. One second seeing the world as you know it, the next experiencing a complete and unending whiteness.

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An unexplained plague of "white blindness" sweeps the unnamed country. Initial attempts to hastily quarantine the blind in an abandoned mental hospital fail to contain the spread. What they succeed at is immediately creating the easy "us versus them" divide between the helpless newly blind and the terrified seeing. Before we know, we are immersed in the horrifying surreal world of hopelessness, filth, violence, and hate, where the true enemy is not their affliction but people themselves, which we can see through the eyes of the only person who appears immune to blindness. aici nimeni nu se mai poate salva, orbire e şi asta, să trăieşti într-o lume unde s-a terminat speranţa”;

We don't know why it happened - whether it's a test, a warning, or a punishment. Instead, we get a nagging haunting feeling that the real blindness was there all along - the blindness towards the others, the blindness towards our real selves, and the physical blindness served as a way to unveil it. What was always there but went unseen before because it used to be easy to shrug off. Fear. "Us against them" attitude. Greed. Contempt. Hatred. Selfishness. Love of power. Cowardice. Apathy. Isolation. Filth. Rape. Murder. Theft. Ignorance. Indifference. Blaming the victim. It was all already there, and blindness amplified it. And, as society decays and falls apart, the question of what is means to be human comes up. I thought that the book is a metaphor of the people that are walking through life without thinking about the violence and cruelty that is in front of them, their ignorance of anything that could menace their civilized life. I believe the book brings forward our fear/avoidance to see our mortality and the insignificance of our lives.

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Conditions degenerate further as an armed clique gains control over food deliveries, subjugating their fellow internees and exposing them to violent assault, rape, and deprivation. Faced with starvation, internees battle each other and burn down the asylum, only to discover that the army has abandoned the asylum, after which the protagonists join the throngs of nearly helpless blind people outside who wander the devastated city and fight one another to survive. After an uprising, folks find out the asylum has been abandoned by the army who was until then responsible for it and they’re able to leave. Realizing that what they went through in quarantine was only a detail in the huge landscape, now we follow our protagonists as they wander through the city in search of better conditions: water, food, clothes, a way to find their homes and their relatives.

I will finish this review with the plea in the epigraph for this thought-provoking eye-opening (no pun intended) book: "If you can see, look. If you can look, observe." Please, do. Let's try to look past our own blindness and actually see. As the world goes blind the wife of the doctor is left unaffected. She continues to help where she can, but is reluctant to let everyone know she can see. She would be a slave to the group if they ever found out she could still see. She breaks out with a group of people all identified by their past professions or by some other identifying marker. We never do learn any of their names as if their identities have escaped them with their loss of vision. I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.” José Saramago’s Blindness can be viewed as an allegory for a world where we see but in fact neglect what is around us. It is a human condition, unquestionable a disease that in contemporary time has only agravated.Saramago was the first Portuguese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in June at age 87. But without doubt it's a brilliantly told story, a fascinating study into human failings, if you allow for the vicarious witnessing of the horror of human degradation to be called fascinating. In-between Saramago manages to create comedy out of tragedy. This is not a new phenomenon in literature but Saramago's treatment has been so light and deadpan that you could deny he ever meant to be ironically humorous in its telling. over years you realise it’s the incremental grain of sand. So, I wouldn’t notice if it changed tomorrow

We failed to put up resistance as we should have done when they first came making demands, Of course, we were afraid and fear isn't always a wise counsellor..." Ms. Heffernan also looks at how a focus on making money can circumscribe what we see and do - and she connects this obsession with the notion of willful blindness. In the late 20th century, she asserts, "public energy suddenly centered on money," and though she does not develop this argument, it has an eerie ring of relevance from a historian's perspective. The last 20 years have witnessed an increasing preoccupation - among all manner of people and organizations - with financial gain. The Donmar’s regular seating has been taken out and replaced with wooden chairs scattered about in suitably distanced pairs. The audience, wearing face masks, sit under glowing bars of criss-crossing, colour-changing light, beautifully designed by Jessica Hung Han Yan, that illustrate the story powerfully. The rumbling sound design by Ben and Max Ringham – the brothers behind last year’s creepy Berberian Sound Studio – creates a constant, aching tension.Unlike the entirely unseeing community in the HG Wells short story that inspired his title, Leland finds many “varietals” of blindness in his encounters. People who are native to blindness, born without sight, are a minority, while many more “naturalised” folk find themselves there, because of sudden injury or slow degeneration. To have no light perception at all is rare (15%). Compared with this extreme, Leland sometimes feels like a fraud. His patchy acuity makes him hesitant in certain situations, such as when invited to cut his newborn son’s umbilical cord or travelling on the subway with his new baby in a sling while carrying a cane. His private feelings of inadequacy are intensified by others’ “scepticism, pity, revulsion, curiosity”. But Ms. Heffernan is chiefly concerned with the dangerous effects of this blindness. She offers a wide range of examples, including spouses who ignored evidence of a partner's adultery, homebuyers who took on excessive mortgage debt, and companies whose compliant employees assumed "levels of risk beyond their ability to recover." This novel is as much an exploration of the horrendous possibilities created by the dysfunction of anatomy as it is of the limits of human resilience to resist consummate annihilation. After all the process of evolution has taught us very little; we adapt to external dangers but we fail when something goes amiss inside our bodies. We would live longer had it not been the case. I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.