Book Title: Blindness

Author: José Saramago

Publishing Company: Harvest/Harcourt

Year: 1999 (1995 in Portuguese)

# of Pages:326

ISBN #: 0-15-100251-7

Reviewed by: Rodrigo Toromoreno (Toronto Correspondent - Canada)

According to a most rudimentary of understandings about the field of linguistics and grammar, a nexus (such as the word ‘and') is able to concatenate various ideas or parts of a speech into one sentence; the comma and other grammatical punctuation-such as the semi-colon found in this sentence-also achieve the same effect. The individual that decides to read Blindness will inevitably notice within the opening pages of the novel that José Saramago chooses to manifest the same linguistic principle of unity through his sparse use of the period. His propensity to write sentences that last several pages may seem to be merely a patent form of establishing an idiosyncratic style; however, it is inconceivable to produce the same piquant work of prose without this overt technique. This seemingly concordant architecture of words and sentences provides the access point for engaging with the novel at a level beyond what critics jejunely credit as a parable, revealing the work to be one of the pithiest analysis on language and its effect on human interactions outside the field of literary criticism.

The plot centres on number of victims of a blinding disease that turns their vision into a "milky sea" of white. While this pandemic strikes the citizens of Saramago's unnamed city, the majority of the story unfolds through the thoughts and experiences of a sundry cast of characters quarantined at an abandoned mental asylum. Amongst these characters is a man with an eye-patch, a lascivious girl with dark glasses, a boy with a squint, the first victim to go blind, his wife, an ophalmologist, and his wife. The latter, however, is the only person in the city to still preserve her vision and, as a result of this enigma, also becomes the reader's only ‘real' access to the occurrences in the asylum. As she witnesses the helpless manner in which the other blind men and women trip over each other, the usurpation of power by other ‘inmates', and the eventual decline of the asylum into a scatological inferno, the woman wishes at one point that she were blind like the others so that she would not witness these acts. This play between the dichotomy of seeing and being ignorant to the events around oneself is enough to validate the position of the Nobel laureate's work in the pantheon of western literature.

However, Blindness does not merely present a situation where the absence of sight is fatal, but it also examines why it is fatal. One of the many ingenious ways Saramago does so is through the re-evaluation of tired maxims. A phrase such as, "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king", acquires a new significance upon realizing that the doctor's wife, although thought to be blind by the other victims and treated as such, is the literal embodiment of the proverbial Cyclops. Thus, words that may once have been spoken arbitrarily become a pungent reality for the characters of this book. In other words, language (under which category dictums are found) undergoes a brusque change, which in turn presents the characters with an impasse in terms of communication. The true horror that Saramago appears to convey is not the inability to see, but the inability for humans to talk to understand each other; the doctor's wife with her sight must witness experiences that she will never be able to express to her husband because they are based on ineffable emotions.

Contrary to the incommunicable characters of his novel, Saramago manages enrapture the reader through the felicitous use of laconic terms as the story flows seamlessly without a single superfluous word along the way. Far from belittling this magnificent work by resorting to a comparison, Saramago has managed to reinstate in the western novel a vernacular that is at once direct yet never trite that has been absent since Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. For those skeptical of the fact that the forceful language of the original may be lost in the novel's transition to English, rest assured that translators Giovanni Pontierro and Margaret Jull Costa offer a pristine translation of the magnum opus known as Blindness.