Saturday, April 18, 2009

Cannonball Read - Book 27

Jose Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, and I totally understand why. Blindness was like no book I've ever read before - except for, maybe, The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. None of the characters had names. The punctuation was scant, and sentences ran to half-a-page or longer. Sometimes, that made my eyes hurt. Maybe that was the point.
Blindness is the story of a population suddenly gone blind. People are interred in an abandoned asylum, left to fend for themselves with minimal government intervention, and it's pretty horrifying what happens to these people. Both the good guys and the bad guys suffer awful things, and it can be hard to root for the good guys at times. But then, just when you think it can't get any worse - it doesn't. It's over. The ending was kind of a letdown.
Fancy writer people say the Blindness is an allegory on spiritual blindness. Well, duh.

Blindness - B

1 comment:

Figgy said...

Really have to get my hands on this, it sounds greatj and right up my alley.