★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital + Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
What would happen if blindness became a contagious epidemic? That’s the premise of this highly allegorical novel by the Nobel Prize-winning José Saramago. We learn how fragile the underpinnings of civilization really are, how ugly humans can be to one another when hungry or when given power, how quickly we adapt to even the most inhuman conditions.
This is a bleak book with a bleak message: the government, the church, all of us are blind to the misery around us. We turn a blind eye to injustice, prejudice, cruelty, hypocrisy. We see, but we do not observe.
I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
Two unusual literary techniques reinforce the message of complicity: none of the characters are named, implying both anonymity and universality; and dialogue is presented in long run-on sentences without any attributions, as if it doesn’t matter who is speaking. It is all of us.
Despite the grim conditions of this dystopian novel, an underpinning of generosity and family allows the main characters to navigate this unthinkable world with their humanity intact. It’s this kindness in a miserable world that gives any meaning to an otherwise inhuman existence.
If there’s a moral here, it’s that our civilization hinges not on the resources of the government or the church, but on ourselves and how we take personal care of one another.