Blindness (Vintage classics)

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There are so many powerful scenes and moments in this book, and I think there is a deeper layer that needs to be unraveled. But there are some amazingly poignant moments that underscore a powerful and deeply layered book. I’m paraphrasing here, but there is one moment in the novel where, after so many dire and life-threatening moments of anguish and struggle, where the doctor says we are half dead, and his wife replies that we are half alive. I think that is an indication of how the heroes of this novel work and, the power of the struggle to live has a life all its own. urn:oclc:67815987 Scandate 20101125061931 Scanner scribe3.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda.

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. 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”. Update. I said I would never read another Saramago because of his writing style. I did though. All the Names and Death with Interruptions. Both brilliant. But I listened to them. I wouldn't have appreciated them as much if I'd had to struggle through Saramago's idiosyncratic writing style.

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La ce-mi ajută că văd. O ajutase ca să ştie despre oroare mai multe decît îşi închipuise vreodată, o ajutase ca să-şi dorească să fie oarbă, la nimic altceva...”; 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. I AM BLIND. This is the beginning of what my son labelled the scariest book he ever read, and yet such a perfectly brilliant masterpiece. Similar to Camus' La peste and Ionesco's Rhinocéros in more than one respect, it takes the reader to the darkest abyss of despair and filth and pain. Enjoy access to the rest of our library collection, with access to braille books, as well as music and learning resources.

Anyone who is going to die is already dead and does not know it, That we're going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, That's why, in some ways, it's as if we were born dead, ……. 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. But without doubt it's a brilliantly told story, a fascinating study into human failings, if you allow for the vicarious witnessing of the horror of human degradation to be called fascinating. In-between Saramago manages to create comedy out of tragedy. This is not a new phenomenon in literature but Saramago's treatment has been so light and deadpan that you could deny he ever meant to be ironically humorous in its telling. But Ms. Heffernan is chiefly concerned with the dangerous effects of this blindness. She offers a wide range of examples, including spouses who ignored evidence of a partner's adultery, homebuyers who took on excessive mortgage debt, and companies whose compliant employees assumed "levels of risk beyond their ability to recover." The city afflicted by the blindness is never named, nor the country specified. Few definite identifiers of culture are given, which contributes an element of timelessness and universality to the novel. However, there are some signs that hint that the country is Saramago's homeland of Portugal: the main character is shown eating chouriço, a spicy sausage, and some dialogue in the original Portuguese employs the familiar "tu" second-person singular verb form (a distinction absent in most of Brazil). The church, with all its saintly images, is likely of the Catholic variety.Let's use our eyes, literally and figuratively, to see what we need to see. Let's not turn a blind eye to the world's troubles! We know we can easily fall into the barbaric state of blindness. It has happened before.

This is a an important book, one that is unafraid to face all of the horror of the century."— Washington Post There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. M-am întrebat de ce a ales autorul să pună dialogurile în text, de ce a renunțat adeseori la semnele de punctuație, de ce alineatele sînt foarte rare... Lectura devine astfel mai dificilă, unii renunță pur și simplu să termine romanul. Bănuiesc că Saramago știa bine asta. Nu este, cred, un simplu procedeu „poetic”, o găselniță grafică, lipsită de sens. Vă amintiți, cred, de poetul e. m. cummings, care a minusculat totul, și versurile, și numele propriu. 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.

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Blindness, it is, or is it really? We have been brought up with the notion of blindness in which a person loses its ability to see things as they are, more often than not it reveals out empathy and compassion from us. But could Blindness draw out baffling horror out of humanity, perhaps if it succeeds in showing the ignominy of humanity to itself; probably that’s what Jose Saramago has been able to achieve with this masterpiece. It just holds an inhuman mirror which shows humiliation of entire humanity, the farcicality of civilization to reveal our savage and primitive nature hidden under its inauthentic sheath of comfort, which is stripped down to rags of acrid and stifling truth, however appalling it may be. We invariably boast about feathers we have been able to add in the crown of humanity, over the years of civilization, but have we really moved a bit, transformed a bit from what we were, Jose Saramago shattered such notions, if any, with disdain; but perhaps that is how we really are, the ghastly image he shows us is probably we are essentially. strangers on the street to my closest intimates – my wife and my mother. And that moved blindness from being a sort of A stunningly powerful novel of humanity's will to survive against all odds during an epidemic by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is a an important book, one that is unafraid to face all of the horror of the century."—Washington Post