Barnie's Book Reviews #2 of 2008

[loosechanj]

Blindness, Jose Saramago

Whew, that was exhausting. Saramago loves absurdly lengthy run-on sentences and two or three page paragraphs, and that's what every single of its 326 pages contained. He also seems to despise quotation marks, there wasn't one pair in the whole book. Maybe I'm just old and tired, but I like to at least have the option of a comfortable pausing point somewhat frequently but this book gives them few and very far between so reading it feels like running a marathon. It's the literary equivalent of waterboarding.

Which is a shame, because the premise of a nationwide epidemic of "white" blindness and its consequences could have been riveting. It did manage to transcend its atrocious formatting in points, the account of the first cases of the unusual phenomenon of a man's being struck blind in his car at a stoplight, the degredation and humiliation experienced in quarantine by some of the sufferers, and their escape from confinement after society had broken down to such an extent it couldn't keep the initial cases interred any longer and their exploration of that world outside after escaping.

It amazes me this won the Nobel prize, because for all the power of the story it really is just this side of unreadable.

Comments

[krues8dr.livejournal.com]

Pardon the input of a complete stranger (reading foaf pages), but I'm so glad someone else felt this way about this book. The fact also struck me that it's a really mediocre rewriting of Camus' "The Plague." And they gave it the Nobel Prize! It doesn't make any sense. I can only assume that it's drastically better in the original Portugese.