You never quite feel you can see what's going on, you feel that your viewpoint is constrained – in fact, you feel partially blind. I initially thought it was clever none of the characters are named, either, merely referred to by their position – the first man, the doctor's wife, the man with the black eye-patch, and so on – and the combination of the two is intensely claustrophobic. Speech runs on in a sprawling mess, How does that work, By separating each statement with a comma and a capital, Oh I see, It takes a while to get used to. That means no hyphens, no semicolons – and no quotation marks, either.
Saramago uses only commas and periods to punctuate his sentences. I meant to get hold of a copy – Nobel Prize-winning speculative fiction seeming too good a chance to pass up – but somehow forgot and it was only when a customer came in before christmas to request a copy that I remembered it.There's something more, though, something I haven't told you about the novel. I first saw Blindness mentioned a couple of years ago, in one of Robert Silverberg's columns for Asimov's. Except the novel I'm describing is Blindness, written by Jose Saramago, 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Thereafter, the situation deteriorates.Standard SF plot, right? Reminiscent of John Wyndham, in fact: total breakdown of society in the face of inexorable disaster. The camps are undermanned and underprovisioned. Panicked, the government sets up internment camps, and rounds up the blind. Later that day, one by one, the doctor's patients go blind.The contagion spreads through the city.
The following morning, the doctor goes blind. The next morning, the wife takes her husband to see an optician, who is baffled. Without warning, a driver waiting at traffic lights goes blind.A good samaritan takes pity on him, and drives him home to his wife.
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