"Blindness" by Jose Saramago--terrifying look at society falling apart

 Blindness reached out and grabbed me from the first page.  A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to come.  The car in the middle lane doesn't move when the light turns green. The driver is blind.  I was surprised and then laughed asking myself, 'Why is a blind man in the driver's seat?' 

He has gone suddenly blind.  A weird white blindness. He cannot see anything except bright whiteness.  Pedestrians and other drivers help him from the car.  One drives the afflicted man home--then steals his car. His later retribution for his theft is horrible and final. We get the feeling of the terrible events to come from the first case of blindness.  

Very soon the personal tragedy becomes a wider and wider apocalypse of white blindness.  The first victim and many others are sent to an abandoned mental hospital. At that point, the story becomes The Lord of the Flies with adults.  Adults can try to impose order and care for each other, but when that fails, adults can be far more horrible than the worst children. In addition to theft, beatings and murder, rape adds another dimension of terror. 

The novel is gripping from first page to last.  I really wanted to know what would happen to the central characters as they and the world descended further and further into chaos.  In Blindness Jose Saramago shows us what life would be like with the whole world going blind. There's no water. No one cleans. Civilization breaks down. Tribes are all that is left. 

In the military, one of the expressions used to indicate a soldier is in very deep trouble is, "You are in a world of shit." The world of Blindness really is a "world of shit." Confined blind people shit in hallways. Walking means stepping in shit. Released from confinement blind people wander the streets of the city, and the streets and buildings become latrines.  

With everyone going blind no one can deliver food--or anything else.  Saramago writes vividly about this world of terror and filth. 

I will stop here. Endings should be experienced.  If you read dystopian books, I could not recommend this book more highly. 

My favorite dystopian novel is the post-nuclear-holocaust story A Canticle for Liebowitz. Blindness is just as brilliant, just as surprising, just as terrifying.

Blindness was the fourth of eight novels published by Saramago. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998 for his work.