Book Review: Blindness by Jose Saramago

Blindness by José Saramago

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

I bought this book as a "I need a book to read" book and really enjoyed it. I couldn't put it down. It was one of those stories that made me think, "What if this really happened?"


An eye doctor, his wife, a man and his wife, a young woman with dark glasses, a boy with a squint, an old man with an eye-patch and a woman with insomnia tell the story.

A White Blindness (all that is seen is white, not black) becomes an epidemic. To try to contain the spread, the government created a quarantine in an old mental hospital for anyone who was blind or came in contact with someone who was blind.

There is no contact with the outside world. All chaos breaks loose and there is nobody to keep order.

One person can see and becomes their guide, but doesn't let on that she can see.

What struck me about this story was the writing. Saramago has an extensive vocabulary and a very unique writing style. The dialogue is not broken up by paragraphs or quoted. Instead, it's written as one long paragraph at a time. The paragraphs take on a page and a half or more. The characters don't have names, just descriptions. It adds to the mystery and the chaos and the unknown. The characters don't know anyone's name.

This book is not fluff. It is not horror. It is not light. It has no political agenda. It just tells a story. A story that made my brain think, "What if?" Is this realistic? Is this how life would be? How would I react?

This book won the Nobel Prize for Literature

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