Blindness
Ratings293
Average rating4
Disgusting normies go feral and then do disgusting things. Terrible affirmation.
Reminder to not read fiction which makes me want to speedread. A favourite of my friend.
This doesn't challenge me or bring me to new places. This uses a pandemic as a metaphor which makes it hard to judge. This is written in simple prose. This uses blindness and explores it in a boring way which wastes the very concept, it is treated as an infliction more serious than it is as there are no side effects. There are boring rape scenes that do not bring any value to the work. I feel like I learned nothing about human nature from this, it feels like humanities flaws were intensified here, I mean at least normies have more dignity typically or let me think so. Using blindness and correlating it with being blind to issues is not tasteful and something we should move away from when writing. Perhaps for the time it was written it wasn't that bad to do that, but I don't think it aged well.
TBH, it took me a while to really get into it.
Maybe I did so as the characters were more developed.
But once I did, I really appreciated both the style and philosophical undercurrents.
I would say it's a dark book, rather trying to convey it's message through showing the darkness, pun intended.
Some of the takes in this one really age it but overall it was a really solid and engaging read. The choice not to name the characters really worked here.
This book isn't scary in a traditional sense but rather scary to contemplate going through what the characters of the book do. I found the story very enjoyable, however the writing style was a little bit weird, I had switch to the audiobook version to keep everything straight. I also found some of the philosophical musings to be a bit much but otherwise I thought this was a very interesting look at an apocalyptic story. Giving it a rating of 4.5/5
Really dense read, but thrilling once you get used to the structure. The sentences run long, yes, but there is so much to cover here. Ultimately, I found myself having to sit in silence after finishing it. That's a positive in my mind.
The style of this book is a little strange with no quotes or chapters and really long “sentences,” and I don't know if the author being quirky (or is it just lazy) really adds to the book. I guess it does kind of lend itself to a stream of consciousness typa writing but sometimes I need to breathe! The story itself is a pretty intriguing concept, there is some kind of “blind pandemic” with people suddenly going blind while one character retains the ability to see. It's interesting how much of a superpower a basic sense becomes when no one else has it. At times the story got um very very uncomfortable (why do the twins keep subjecting the book club to this!!) but it has lord of the flies vibes in terms of how humanity deconstructs faced with something so devastating to our standard of living and I think it was a probably realistic depiction of that deconstruction.
I didn't like how it's never explained where the blind plague came from or how it suddenly got cured?? . Like I want to know WHY and I hate when authors place characters in real world settings with some kind of fantastical/sciency twist only to use it as a plot device to examine human nature... Although I guess it could be claimed this book doesn't take place in our world since there are no names of anything at all in the book.
Overall I would say it's a good read but I would never read it again nor actively recommend it to someone else.
Me encantó la forma de contar la historia, muy interesante y espectacular.
Leo eso está claro pero tampoco es el peor simplemente no me encandiló como muchos otros libros. Qué es bastante fuerte tal vez para algunas personas que es de una violación pero eso a mí no me dio como que mucho no era tan explícita eso está bien que las escenas no sean tan explícita Pero igualmente si quitamos a cenar sigue siendo un libro pesado para mí sigue siendo un libro que no no me encanta simplemente es una obligación que tenía que leerlo y tan pesado se me hizo que escuchando el audio libro se me hizo eterno insoportable y fundamente feo
Worth the read - although at times helpless - it is an insightful analysis into humanity. “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are “
There was no payoff for the time spent on this book intellectually, spiritually, or viscerally. I almost never say this, but I appreciated the film more because it managed to convey the same ideas without the tedium.
I understand that the writing style (run-on sentences, no separation of dialogue, no punctuation) may have been meant to give the writer the same feeling of stumbling around blindly but since it didn't truly achieve this, by the time I reached the last hundred pages I was weary of it.
I will avoid rating this for now, as I may try to read this again in a few months or a year or so. When we're not in a real-life quarantine maybe it won't feel so odious.
Saramago uses words in a way that you feel everything he tells. It was slow at the beginning but then it was like a river. If I could give ten stars I would give without even thinking.
Some potent writing here. Overall the book is a study on the strength of the rules and conventions of modern society and the quality of the prose is outstanding and many many aspects of interpersonal and group relationship are in evidence. I also like that the setup of the book is written in a very tense way that would make you feel scared and powerless like you were reading a book from Stephen King. But then the book evolves through his many themes, while telling a coherent stories, in which heroes behave like normal persons, that means that they are not always seizing every opportunity to show their value and bravery. Great style, great story, maybe some stereotyping here and there, or maybe it's just that I don't want to accept that some common human traits are true...
Wasn't a fan of his writing style at first but I came around after a few chapters. It's actually quite unsettling at times and has the effect of drawing you into the malaise of the blind characters. A great and unexpected dystopian nightmare. Would have been five stars were it not for the atrocious ending.
Contains spoilers
Read this along with 2 senior AP Lit classes. While I really loved discussing the book with the students, I didn't love the book. In fact I plain didn't like it, though I appreciated a good portion of the writing, even though there was some heavy-handedness at times. I definitely had to take emotional breaks when it was at peak humanity's-descent-to-hell. I'm not sure I'm ever getting that pivotal blood/semen/shit gang rape & murder scene out of my head, unfortunately.
...есть у них, у недостатков, этих и всех прочих, такое свойство – чуть только упомяни о них, как из едва заметных делаются они более чем очевидными.
крутейший роман! в осадке от полноты чувств и мыслей.
A strange, grotesque novel but allegorical and fascinating. Four stars for intrigue and creativity, though it's not one I ever plan to reread.
This book was good, but too hard to get through due to lack of punctuation and structure. Paragraphs are long run-on sentences with commas to break up talking between characters and narration.
Interesting and sad. The author's style (translated from Portuguese) is both unique and engaging.
Once in a while, I am vaguely amused after finishing a book to find that the description on the back cover actually did the novel justice. In this case, someone described “Blindness” as “a magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century.” Indeed. Now, normally I am not one to shy away from the depressing. I fall more into the “bring it on” camp. Literature is about life, and life is frequently tragic. Tolstoy, happy families, blah blah. That said, SWEET JESUS. A glimmer of hope doesn't appear until the last five pages, but Saramago spent the previous 300+ pages doing a pretty damn fine job convincing me that even when there is goodness in the world, we squander it. And I'm an optimist! Retrospectively, I am glad that I read this, and appreciate the challenges that reading it entailed. However, Nobel prize be damned, I'm going to need some literary pep in my life before I attempt to digest any more of his work.
This book was interesting, but it wasn't meant to be. I went to book club after half finishing it and learned that later in the book is what someone described as “the most horrible rape scene they'd ever read in a book.” We discussed the ending and I decided not to finish it.