A review by jbmorgan86
Blindness by José Saramago
5.0
Lock Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, Albert Camus, and George Orwell in a room together and tell them to come up with a novel. The result could easily be Jose Saramago's Blindness. In a nutshell, the whole world goes blind and sees only white. Humans are reduced down to their primal state: filth, hatred, rape, murder, etc.
There are no monsters, aliens, ghosts, werewolves, nor ax murderers in this novel and yet its is possibly the most horrifying novel I've ever read. Saramago uses blindness as tool to reveal what humanity is really like under the surface: "Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are." The blindness does not make people animals, it reveals that they (we?) are animals: "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."
This book is not for the faint of heart. Much of the novel is gag-worthy. However, there is so much to "chew on" here. Particularly of interest, to me, was a scene in which some of the characters enter a church and the paintings of the saints are vandalized with a streak of white paint over the eyes:
I see [the priest] going from one to the other, climbing up the altars and tying bandages with a double knot so that they do not come undone and slip off, applying two coats of paint to the pictures in order to make the white night into which they are plunged still thicker, that priest must have committed the worst sacrilege of all times and all religions, the fairest and most radically human, coming here to declare that, ultimately, God does not deserve to see."
There are no monsters, aliens, ghosts, werewolves, nor ax murderers in this novel and yet its is possibly the most horrifying novel I've ever read. Saramago uses blindness as tool to reveal what humanity is really like under the surface: "Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are." The blindness does not make people animals, it reveals that they (we?) are animals: "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."
This book is not for the faint of heart. Much of the novel is gag-worthy. However, there is so much to "chew on" here. Particularly of interest, to me, was a scene in which some of the characters enter a church and the paintings of the saints are vandalized with a streak of white paint over the eyes:
I see [the priest] going from one to the other, climbing up the altars and tying bandages with a double knot so that they do not come undone and slip off, applying two coats of paint to the pictures in order to make the white night into which they are plunged still thicker, that priest must have committed the worst sacrilege of all times and all religions, the fairest and most radically human, coming here to declare that, ultimately, God does not deserve to see."