It is easier for me to lambaste a book when it is a translation; after all, maybe it is not the author who should be held accountable for the text’s flaws. Whether or not the translator is culpable, Blindness indeed has many flaws.

Unlike the entirely unseeing community in the HG Wells short story that inspired his title, Leland finds many “varietals” of blindness in his encounters. People who are native to blindness, born without sight, are a minority, while many more “naturalised” folk find themselves there, because of sudden injury or slow degeneration. To have no light perception at all is rare (15%). Compared with this extreme, Leland sometimes feels like a fraud. His patchy acuity makes him hesitant in certain situations, such as when invited to cut his newborn son’s umbilical cord or travelling on the subway with his new baby in a sling while carrying a cane. His private feelings of inadequacy are intensified by others’ “scepticism, pity, revulsion, curiosity”. An early band of affected citizens is sent to a mental ward, in the hopes of containing this sudden epidemic of blindness. Only one among them can see, a woman as unnamed as anyone else in the story, but we come to know her as “the doctor's wife.” Third: Unfortunately, the only constant that the narrative voice does have is a meaninglessly verbose style. While I laud Nabokov for one sentence that appears to be a paragraph, that is only because that sentence is composed of so many beautiful parts (all punctuated correctly, no less) that work together to create an even more beautiful image. This writing is more akin to the wandering, rambling speech of Grandpa Simpson which, while hilarious on The Simpsons, has no place within this story. The Day of the Triffids, the 1951 John Wyndham novel (and its many adaptations) about societal collapse following widespread blindness IN the wake of recent disasters - from nuclear reactor failures to oil spills to the collapse of the subprime mortgage market - we have focused on which people and institutions might be to blame. How, we ask in hindsight, could people and institutions have failed to foresee clear signs of trouble - even in the face of warnings?

It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. blindness, both sighted people looking at blindness and also blind people. And there’s a guy named Father Thomas J Someone once said: "You are who you are when no one is watching." And in this world, no one is watching. Fear reigns and some will choose to exploit the fear or succumb to it. I thought it was a frightening and believable portrait of the disintegration of society. This novel is as much an exploration of the horrendous possibilities created by the dysfunction of anatomy as it is of the limits of human resilience to resist consummate annihilation. After all the process of evolution has taught us very little; we adapt to external dangers but we fail when something goes amiss inside our bodies. We would live longer had it not been the case. Theme: Existence, Uncertainty, and Autonomy; Good, Evil, and Moral Conscience; Biological Needs and Human Society

Things that made us human are gone. Faces don't matter. Names don't matter. Homes don't matter. Possessions don't matter. Shame and modesty are gone. Medicine is useless. Government is useless. Morals seem obsolete. Empathy is gone. Is anything left? Anything inside us? This is a an important book, one that is unafraid to face all of the horror of the century."—Washington Post We will continue to send out Talking Books on CD at the reading rate of each reader. An avid reader will continue to receive frequent books and an occasional reader will receive fewer books at the same speed they currently do now. When we think of someone, when we hear their name, we always conjure an image in our head; a picture is formed before our eyes. Here we are with a bunch of people who no longer can rely on their sight so, in not giving them names, Saramago also puts us in the dark, forcing us to rely instead on personal characteristics and descriptions given to conjure these characters ourselves. “Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.” Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-06-21 22:12:43 Boxid IA118613 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City San Diego, CA Curatenote shipped DonorI thought that the book is a metaphor of the people that are walking through life without thinking about the violence and cruelty that is in front of them, their ignorance of anything that could menace their civilized life. I believe the book brings forward our fear/avoidance to see our mortality and the insignificance of our lives. 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.” Just imagine that you are going about your daily life as you always do. It's a normal day; nothing out of the ordinary. But then, suddenly, without any forewarning, you go completely blind. One second seeing the world as you know it, the next experiencing a complete and unending whiteness.