Blindness

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Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.” Ricardo Reis meets dead Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and encounters two women who may be figments of Pessoa's poetry in this extraordinarily nuanced novel. (Mar.) See boxed review, p. 76, for book Continue reading » The first blind man’s wife is one of the novel’s protagonists; she drives her husband to visit the doctor at the beginning of the book and then goes blind herself and gets reunited with…

This is the novel Saramago was writing when he won the Nobel Prize in 1998. La caverna has the abundant compassion, subtlety, and wit of his earlier works, such as Blindness (Ensayo sobre la Continue reading » It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. The doctor and his wife invite their new "family" to their apartment, where they establish a mutually supportive long-term home. Then, just as suddenly as his sight had been lost, the driver – the first man to lose their sight – recovers his sight, indicating that the body had fought off the disease, and that the blindness is ultimately temporary. They celebrate and their hope is restored.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. Oscar-nominated director films movie based on a Nobel Prize winning book in Guelph". guelph.ca. City of Guelph. Archived from the original on 2007-10-21 . Retrieved 2007-09-14. Saramago's chilling thriller about an epidemic of “white blindness” that affects everyone in its path is a truly remarkable tale of loss and a metaphor for the horrors of Continue reading » The novel’s main protagonist, the doctor’s wife is the only character who can see for most of the book. Although she can still see, the doctor’s wife lies, saying she has also gone blind… Vlessing, Etan (2008-08-01). " 'Blindness' to open Atlantic Film Fest". The Hollywood Reporter. Nielsen Company. Archived from the original on 2013-04-18 . Retrieved 2008-08-01.

The doctor's wife reminded me of so many women I have known who have been abandoned by their partners. So many women who have had to shoulder up and do the job of both woman and man, both mother and father. I finished this masterpiece last week and I let it to sink in a little bit before reviewing it. The power of this book was quite overwhelming at times and I had to stop reading for a few days at a time. I do not think there are many books that disturbed me like this one. Maybe Never Let Me Go but there the message was much more subtle. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped. 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..."His fledgling José Saramago Foundation is poised to move into new premises. Speaking through a translator, he says the aim is to "bring a new dynamic to cultural life in Portugal". The foundation's director is Saramago's wife of 20 years, Pilar del Rio, a journalist who is now his Spanish translator. Blindness, it is, or is it really? We have been brought up with the notion of blindness in which a person loses its ability to see things as they are, more often than not it reveals out empathy and compassion from us. But could Blindness draw out baffling horror out of humanity, perhaps if it succeeds in showing the ignominy of humanity to itself; probably that’s what Jose Saramago has been able to achieve with this masterpiece. It just holds an inhuman mirror which shows humiliation of entire humanity, the farcicality of civilization to reveal our savage and primitive nature hidden under its inauthentic sheath of comfort, which is stripped down to rags of acrid and stifling truth, however appalling it may be. We invariably boast about feathers we have been able to add in the crown of humanity, over the years of civilization, but have we really moved a bit, transformed a bit from what we were, Jose Saramago shattered such notions, if any, with disdain; but perhaps that is how we really are, the ghastly image he shows us is probably we are essentially.

Wearing the new dress that she bought yesterday in a shop downtown, death goes to the concert. She is sitting alone in the box, and . . . she is looking at the cellist. Just before the lights went down, when the orchestra was waiting for the conductor to come, he noticed her. He wasn't the only musician to do so. Firstly, because she was alone in the box, which although not rare, wasn't that frequent an occurrence either. Secondly, because she was pretty . . . pretty in a very particular, indefinable way that couldn't be put into words, like a line of poetry whose ultimate meaning . . . continually escapes the translator. And finally, because her lone figure, there in the box, surrounded by emptiness and absence on every side, as if she inhabited a void, seemed to be the expression of the most absolute solitude." Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter described Blindness as "provocative but predictable cinema", startling but failing to surprise. Honeycutt criticized the film's two viewpoints: Julianne Moore's character, the only one who can see, is slow to act against atrocities, and the behavior of Danny Glover's character comes off as "slightly pompous". Honeycutt explained, "This philosophical coolness is what most undermines the emotional response to Meirelles' film. His fictional calculations are all so precise and a tone of deadly seriousness swamps the grim action." [38] Justin Chang of Variety described the film: " Blindness emerges onscreen both overdressed and undermotivated, scrupulously hitting the novel's beats yet barely approximating, so to speak, its vision." Chang thought that Julianne Moore gave a strong performance but did not feel that the film captured the impact of Saramago's novel. [39] Roger Ebert called Blindness "one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen." [40] A. O. Scott of The New York Times stated that, although it "is not a great film, ... it is, nonetheless, full of examples of what good filmmaking looks like." [41]Moyano, an acclaimed Argentinian novelist imprisoned and, in 1976, exiled because of his political convictions, weaves an allegorical narrative of exceptional clarity and insight. His single-minded Continue reading » The city afflicted by the blindness is never named, nor the country specified. Few definite identifiers of culture are given, which contributes an element of timelessness and universality to the novel. However, there are some signs that hint that the country is Saramago's homeland of Portugal: the main character is shown eating chouriço, a spicy sausage, and some dialogue in the original Portuguese employs the familiar "tu" second-person singular verb form (a distinction absent in most of Brazil). The church, with all its saintly images, is likely of the Catholic variety. The film also contains visual cues, such as the 1568 painting The Parable of the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Allusions to other famous artworks are also made. Meirelles described the intent: "It's about image, the film, and vision, so I thought it makes sense to create, not a history of painting, because it's not, but having different ways of seeing things, from Rembrandt to these very contemporary artists. But it's a very subtle thing." [9] Release [ edit ] Theatrical run [ edit ] One character, a Cassandra of sorts, is excluded from the plague, and she guides the plot with her seeing eyes. What she sees is unbearable, even to the reader. Rarely have I felt more shaken than while reading the scene with the blind thugs raping hungry women. The seeing woman steps in and uses her power to break off the horror show, but it will leave a scar on my reading inner eye forever. Bizarrely, that means a scene I never actually saw is engraved on my visual memory.

The doctor's wife sees everything, and she is in the best and the worst position of all. She sees what needs to be done, but she must do it alone, and do it while the men sell-out her and every other woman in their ward (MEN OF WARD ONE—YOU SONS OF WHORES, I WILL NEVER, EVER FORGIVE YOU). Kelly, Brendan (2008-07-15). "Toronto unveils Canadian selection". Variety. Reed Business Information . Retrieved 2008-07-25. The old man with the eye patch is one of the novel’s protagonists; he’s a patient of the doctor. The old man has cataracts and has already gone blind in one eye (which he…Eberstadt, Fernanda (2007-08-26). "The Unexpected Fantasist". The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times Company. A man with a handgun appoints himself "king" of his ward, and takes control of the food deliveries, first demanding the other wards' valuables, and then for the women to have sex with their men. In an effort to obtain necessities, several women reluctantly submit to being raped. One of the women is killed by her assailant, and the doctor's wife retaliates, killing the "king" with a pair of scissors. Independently, other raped women sneak to the dead king's ward and set it on fire, which rapidly engulfs the building, with many inmates dying in the ensuing chaos. The survivors who escape the building discover that the guards have abandoned their posts, and they venture out into the city. 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. Dawtrey, Adam (2008-04-29). " 'Blindness' to open Cannes". Variety. Reed Business Information . Retrieved 2008-05-01. Completed in 1953 but not released in the author’s native Portuguese until 2011 (and appearing here in English for the first time), this early novel from Nobel winner Saramago (Blindness) Continue reading »