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by José Saramago
In a word (or two or three): the movie tanked. how 'bout the book?
From Mr. Hipster:
I must admit that I first became aware
of this book because of the movie whose commercials reminded me
of Children of Men. Granted, I didn't up really lovin'
that movie, but I did really like the idea behind it. Likewise,
the plot of this seemed allegorical and sci-fi enough to fly. I
didn't up seeing Blindness in the theaters, but in looking
for new books to buy, I came across the novel, which, to my surprise
won the Nobel Prize for literature (or, more properly, its author)!
I swear I had been up and down the National Book Award and Nobel
lists a million times, and don't recall this guy. I must have dismissed
him outright at some point because he writes in Portuguese. Yeah,
I definitely had a bias against translated novels at some point
in my life. I'm not sure why, but my ethnocentrism seems to have
mostly evaporated. Mostly.
Taking place in some city in some unnamed country (but presumably
somewhere akin to Lisbon), all of a sudden people start going blind.
We first encounter patient zero as he sits stunned at a traffic
light, a bright white light invading his field of vision, plunging
him not into darkness, but into a world of never-ending whiteness.
He is helped home by a stranger who promptly steals his car. This
patient zero ultimately goes to the eye doctor, who can't figure
out what's up. And then the doctor goes blind, along with every
patient in the doctor's office over the next couple days. They all
find themselves, along with some others, thrown into an old mental
hospital by the army.
And so begins the tale that is so familiar to us all about the end
of the world--or what we can only assume is the end of the world.
Of course we have no concept if the blindness exists outside of
this small-ish group, as they are sequestered away from the rest
of the world. Yet another pretty common plot device, but interesting
in the microcosm it creates. We see the world within the asylum
grow and morph and eventually devolve into chaos and depravity.
The interesting plot twist, of course, is that amongst the blind
is one woman who can see. She is immune to the disease for reasons
we never really find out, but keeps this fact a secret throughout
her time in the asylum.
Eventually the army piles more internees into the hospital to quarantine
them from society. Then things start getting completely out of control
when the food dries up, as one wing full of men hordes the rations
and starts demanding the women from the other wings as payment.
There's some stabbing and burning and things basically go to hell.
Ultimately we find out the army has gone, and that the world beyond
the hospital has also gone blind. The book turns into a mini-version
of 12 Monkeys, Outbreak, Night of the Comet,
I Am Legend, and The
Road--pick your poison. Everyone is starving, and everyone is
blind. Except our one woman, of course. It's a bizarrely frustrating
feeling. We basically see our little group wander around for the
rest of the book trying to get back to their apartments and eat,
and, well, that's it.
The book had very good potential, and while its author did win a
Nobel Prize, I didn't find it the most artful thing in the world.
Maybe something was lost in the translation (after all, there's
a note that the translator died part way through his work), but
there were some sections that were pretty flat and repetitive. The
whole book is told in a weird kind of voice that is almost part
omniscient narrator and part reporter. It's unclear whose voice
we're really hearing, as the shifts are sometimes jarring when the
author lapses into commentary that seems really out of place in
the context of the apocalyptic tale. There's also a lot of reference
to defecation, filth and general muck. I suppose it would be a pretty
stinky world when there's no running water and nobody can see where
he or she's pooping, or has a change of clothing. I'm not sure it's
all the crap, but the book tends to bog down in weird details that
really give away the fact this thing wasn't written by a native
English speaker -- or at least a North American. I can't really
describe it, but there's a fixation in the book that is particularly
European (non-UK Europe). Ultimately, I'm just not sure what the
point of this thing was, but perhaps it's because I am
an ethnocentric American and don't get the whole politics and history
of the thing.
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