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Blindness
In Nobel Prize–winning author Saramago’s experimental South American novel, a “white blindness” epidemic hits a city card. The blind are sent to a mental hospital to try to contain the virus, leaving them vulnerable to theft and assault. It’s a powerful tale of us vs them, the blind vs the sighted, and what it means to keep your humanity in the face of the unknown. I recommended this experimental South American novel to Max Dunn on episode 48 of What Should I Read Next. (He read it; he liked it.)
About the Book
Publisher’s description:
A city is hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses-and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit.
The stunningly powerful novel of man’s will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature
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