A review by thaurisil
Blindness by José Saramago

5.0

It is a great truth that says that the worst blind person was the one who did not want to see

If I ever regain my sight, I shall look carefully at the eyes of others, as if I were looking into their souls

An epidemic of blindness breaks out in an unnamed city. It is "white blindness" – everything appears white, rather than black, and it is contagious. The initial victims, comprising the first blind man, the ophthalmologist that he consults, and the ophthalmologist's other patients, are quarantined in an abandoned mental asylum. Among them is the ophthalmologist's wife, who is mysteriously immune to the blindness, but pretends to be blind to join her husband. They are soon joined by hundreds of other patients. Blindness brings with it disorder, difficulties maintaining hygiene, and, as the authorities struggle to supply enough food to the patients, hunger. Soon the inmates degenerate into selfishness, leading to violence, disease, death, and gang rape. The ophthalmologist and his wife do their best to maintain civility. Eventually, someone starts a fire, and the inmates escape to find that the whole city is blind. The ophthalmologist wife leads a band of people, all the ophthalmologist's patients and the first blind man's wife, helping them to source for food, find shelter, and maintain hygiene, in a city  overrun by anarchy, starvation, excrement, and death. The epidemic eventually ends as suddenly as it began, and the people regain their vision.

The bible speaks of people who have eyes but do not see. This is what the people in this novel are – they have bright, shining eyes that do not see. But it is not just their physical eyes that do not see, but the eyes of their soul that do not see either. The authorities do not see that imprisoning people in a mental asylum with limited food, little hygiene, no medical supplies and no contact with the outside world can only inevitably lead to chaos. The inmates do not see that if they are selfish and do not try to help each other, their misery increases. And as the conditions in the asylum deteriorate, it is unfortunately the evil ones who first see that organisation will result in power. They organise themselves, and the result is that the rest of the people are forced to hand over all their valuables in exchange for less than their allotted rations, and the women are forcibly gang-raped. 

There is one woman who sees, the doctor’s wife. She sees physically, and she sees emotionally. She performs little acts of service for the people in her ward, she bathed the women who are raped, she kills the ringleader of the evil ones, and when the people escape from the asylum, she uses her eyes to help her group find food, shelter and rest. 

How much of the doctor’s wife’s goodness is a result of her innate wisdom and kindness, and how much is a result of her having eyes to see? How reliant are we on having eyes to be good? This is a question Saramago explores, as the doctor and the wife do their best to remain civilised and human in an environment where people lie in excrement, people fight with each other for food, and the rapists are described as creatures “whinnying”. But even for the doctor, the line between being a man and being an animal is blurred in a particularly memorable scene where he sleeps with the girl with the dark glasses, observed only by his wife, and his wife does not mind, she understands. 
Saramago’s writing is filled with run-on sentences and phrases separated ungrammatically with only commas. Even dialogues are treated this way, so that the speaker of each line is rarely delineated. I disagree with others that this makes it hard to read. On the contrary, I found that it created a high-paced style that ran on with breaks that were few and far between, resulting in a suffocating sense of anxiety and despair. 

We never learn the names of the characters, only knowing them with identifiers such as the first blind man, the old man with the black eye-patch, and the boy with the squint. The narrator says that in a world where people are blind, names do not matter. That is clearly untrue, as the people need identities, but their descriptors become their identity, and we think of the girl as being one with her dark glasses even when she stops wearing her dark glasses. 

As the story progresses, it is difficult to understand why the doctor’s wife tries so hard to survive in a civilised way. The future is bleak, food is running out, and the people have no cure if they fall ill. What is there to live for? “We are already half dead,” the doctor says, but his wife replies, “We are half alive.” And perhaps that is what this book is about - sometimes it is not about whether we can live. Ur