Blindness (FFP March Book Discussion)

I’ve never read any Saramago, but my copy of Blindness (mooched over a year ago) has been sitting in my  TBR for over a year.  I knew some of my book club friends count this book as one of their favorites, and I’ve been told this particular novel is a good starting point for Saramago, but I put off reading it because I wanted a fresh reading for the scheduled book discussion (in other words, I habitually cram for the book discussions).

Flips Flipping Pages‘ selection for this month was Blindness by Jose Saramago, moderated by Peter and Gege, both big fans of the novel.

 

The premise is very interesting: an epidemic of blindness sweeps an unnamed city; people are suddenly going blind (seeing nothing but white, and okay, that is all I will tell you because anything else will spoil it for you). I thought it would be challenging to read, particularly because of the absence of quotation marks and proper nouns (like the city, the characters are unnamed: “first blind man,” “doctor,” “doctor’s wife,” “girl with the dark glasses,” “boy with a squint,” etc.) and the run-on sentences in Saramago’s writing.

I was pleasantly surprised at how readable and compelling it was — I read most of the book in three hours because  the story got more and more intense, and I couldn’t put it down! I realized I enjoyed the grotesque horror (the levels which reminded me of several novels, but  mostly of Patrick Suskind‘s Perfume and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies) of the novel — binary oppositions collide (“white blindness” amidst the growing squalor — goodbye hygiene!, good vs. evil, self-preservation vs. duty, etc.), and I read in (horrified) fascination as the society grappled with the spreading epidemic, and people of all walks of life attempted to cope, each in their own way, as they were struck by the “white blindness.”

I appreciated the philosophical insight on human nature — there are so many quotables in the book, like this:

Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

and this:

…we’re so remote from the world that any day now, we shall no longer know who we are, or even remember our names, and besides, what use would names be to us, no dog recognizes another dog or knows the others by the names they have been given, a dog is identified by its scent and that is how it identifies others, here we are like another breed of dogs, we know each other’s bark or speech, as for the rest, features, colour of eyes or hair, they are of no importance, it is as if they did not exist, I can still see but for how long.

and this:

There’s no difference between inside and outside, between here and there, between the many and the few, between what we’re living through and what we shall have to live through…this must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it…

I also liked its everyman aspect — the absence of proper nouns in the novel poses a scenario that is all too easy to imagine, as allows the reader to identify with the characters and the extraordinary circumstances they are placed in. It begs much contemplation, and I myself had wild imaginings of what I would do in such a situation.

We had the discussion at O’Sonho, a Portuguese restaurant, and started off with interesting tidbits about Saramago’s life, as well as his writing style.

We then discussed various aspects of the novel: blindness as the great equalizer, government intervention in the epidemic, namelessness and identity, communism, alternative scenarios, the allegory of white blindness, the men vs the women in the novel, favorite scenes in the novel, the film adaptation, and other topics relevant to the book.

My favorite part of the discussion was when we had to draw our reaction to the book and pick out our “blind name.”

I chose “The girl who reads” because I’ll probably be struck by white blindness in the middle of a book, and I’ll probably go around asking people to read the rest of the book to me! :D

I’m glad I was able to attend this discussion, I enjoyed the ideas that were floated, and I finally got to read my first Saramago! I’m definitely going to read more of his books — I have a couple stashed around here, but Death with Interruptions comes highly recommended, and it sounds so interesting, too, that I want to get a copy. Later this year, hopefully.

Ohh, but there’s a new 2-in-1 edition of Blindness and Seeing (loose sequel?!?) coming out soon, I’m drooling! My tie-in edition definitely deserves to be done a Blooey (i.e., getting a second [or third or fourth… and the list goes on] copy of a book you already have for the purpose of “upgrading”  is what my book club friends call “doing a Blooey” in case you don’t know that yet) on!

***

Blindness, movie tie-in trade paperback (mooched), 5/5 stars

Book #33 for 2011

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