A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of our worst appetites and weaknesses—and humanity's ultimately exhilarating spirit. After an uprising, folks find out the asylum has been abandoned by the army who was until then responsible for it and they’re able to leave. Realizing that what they went through in quarantine was only a detail in the huge landscape, now we follow our protagonists as they wander through the city in search of better conditions: water, food, clothes, a way to find their homes and their relatives.

I think even the women had no idea what it really would mean to be raped. They have all had sex, no blushing virgins among them. They were hungry too and after some speculation decide that they need to do this not only to feed themselves, but also their men. It is way beyond anything they could even imagine. It was horrible and Jose Saramago pulls no punches. Being raped by one man is bad enough, but when being raped by several men a woman has become an object, not even an object of desire, but merely a receptacle for lust. Being attractive, or smart or any of the things that made men desire her, in the world before blindness, are suddenly immaterial. She is faceless, a base unit to be used and abused devoid of the uniqueness that identify all of us beyond being just a male or a female.As the blindness epidemic spreads, we see the disintegration of society just like we witnessed the destruction of humanity in the quarantine area. Excrement covers sidewalks, dogs munch on human corpses, the blind rot in the stores after futile attempts to find food. Even the saints in the churches are blinded. The world is a bleak picture of desolation and destruction. Or you can now get your books through an Alexa enabled device such as your smart speaker, tablet or phone. The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, mirroring the society outside. A city is hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women.

People waiting at a traffic light. All of us can see that before our inner eyes, relive thousands of similar situations we have experienced ourselves, without ever giving them a moment of consideration. Thus starts Saramago's Blindness. But there is a disruption. One car is not following the rules all take for granted. The car doesn't move when the light switches to green. People are annoyed, frustrated, disturbed in their routines, but not worried: Ms. Heffernan also looks at how a focus on making money can circumscribe what we see and do - and she connects this obsession with the notion of willful blindness. In the late 20th century, she asserts, "public energy suddenly centered on money," and though she does not develop this argument, it has an eerie ring of relevance from a historian's perspective. The last 20 years have witnessed an increasing preoccupation - among all manner of people and organizations - with financial gain. Some of this filtering is beneficial. It "oils the wheels of social intercourse when we don't see the spot on the silk tie, the girlfriend's acne, or a neighbor's squalor," she writes. At a basic level, selective vision also helps us remain engaged and optimistic day to day. One character, a Cassandra of sorts, is excluded from the plague, and she guides the plot with her seeing eyes. What she sees is unbearable, even to the reader. Rarely have I felt more shaken than while reading the scene with the blind thugs raping hungry women. The seeing woman steps in and uses her power to break off the horror show, but it will leave a scar on my reading inner eye forever. Bizarrely, that means a scene I never actually saw is engraved on my visual memory.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. 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.” José Saramago’s Blindness can be viewed as an allegory for a world where we see but in fact neglect what is around us. It is a human condition, unquestionable a disease that in contemporary time has only agravated. I read the book and watched the film. I didn't find Saramago's style easy to read. Extremely long sentences, endless paragraphs and an idiosyncratic grammar made me have to concentrate on the reading more than the subject matter. It was worth it, but written in standard English I think I would have enjoyed it more. The film was a good, standard, Hollywood film meaning it appeals to the masses, has pretty people and no depth and has been designed to make money. I quite enjoyed it, but am glad I read the book first.

RNIB Certificate in Contracted (Grade 2) Unified English Braille - Exam-only option for blind and partially people You walk home and notice a discarded knit hat at the foot of a tree; you see the street cleaners’ orange signs tied to tree trunks, lampposts, telephone poles. You see a train run alongside you the color of the silver clouds, of the reflected golden light. You see people, in all their shapes, walk past you, each individual and anonymous. You feel anonymous yourself, and therefore more forgiving, more patient. You think everything is possible. You think everything possible must already exist. You think again of something you already believe: that people read the books that find them. That stories arrive to tell themselves, as relevant as news. there’s no grieving that needs to happen, I’m just a happy person. But I think the reality is for someone in my strangers on the street to my closest intimates – my wife and my mother. And that moved blindness from being a sort of

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A particularly bad band of men emerges, thieves and criminals who were probably bad before they were caged like animals. Now they want to take and break everything in the asylum, including the women. 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”. Get help choosing books from our experienced library team, or get technology or reading advice in your own home from our national team of volunteers.