Read the sample Amazon provides through Kindle, I'm still on the fence. It's an interesting premise, the first chapter reads the way I remember Contagion starting. I don't mind the way the dialogue is handled, I mean I don't see the advantage yet, but it's fine; just have to keep a closer track of commas to note when one character stops speaking and another starts.
i'm enjoying it a lot. what i'm finding powerful is this sort of conflict in images between the sad vulnerability of the suddenly blind groping their way around this locked down hospital denied their dignity for the most part and the menace of what the contagion does to people and the brutality of the political response.
i was gripped by the writing style from the start. at first i just thought it was a clever way to give the book a sense of immediacy. however i soon realized that he's trying to replicate stylistically the sense of disorientation you get when suddenly blind, grappling to your other senses that don't quite match what you're used to. so similarly as the reader you lose the sense of structure you're used to in reading a piece of formal writing and you have you piece together who is talking from less concrete clues. sounds really trite when i try and explain it like that but i think it works very well and is immersive anyway.
spoilers for where i'm at -
not totally sure what the purpose of the doctor's wife being able to see despite loads turning before her is so far. i don't know whether he's going for a children of men type thing maybe. she's quite interesting as an audience surrogate, tackling the idea of what it means to observe when others can't see back though.
i was gripped by the writing style from the start. at first i just thought it was a clever way to give the book a sense of immediacy. however i soon realized that he's trying to replicate stylistically the sense of disorientation you get when suddenly blind, grappling to your other senses that don't quite match what you're used to. so similarly as the reader you lose the sense of structure you're used to in reading a piece of formal writing and you have you piece together who is talking from less concrete clues. sounds really trite when i try and explain it like that but i think it works very well and is immersive anyway.
That can't be it, because Saramago uses that style in all his books (and Blindness wasn't even the first).
This is his explanation (my translation):
"It's like I'm telling the story as it was told to me. And, you know, when we talk we don't use punctuation. We pause, like I said in my books, when we talk there's only two punctuation marks: the comma and the period. The short pause and the long pause. To talk is to make music."
not totally sure what the purpose of the doctor's wife being able to see despite loads turning before her is so far. i don't know whether he's going for a children of men type thing maybe. she's quite interesting as an audience surrogate, tackling the idea of what it means to observe when others can't see back though.
That can't be it, because Saramago uses that style in all his books (and Blindness wasn't even the first).
This is his explanation (my translation):
"It's like I'm telling the story as it was told to me. And, you know, when we talk we don't use punctuation. We pause, like I said in my books, when we talk there's only two punctuation marks: the comma and the period. The short pause and the long pause. To talk is to make music."
That can't be it, because Saramago uses that style in all his books (and Blindness wasn't even the first).
This is his explanation (my translation):
"It's like I'm telling the story as it was told to me. And, you know, when we talk we don't use punctuation. We pause, like I said in my books, when we talk there's only two punctuation marks: the comma and the period. The short pause and the long pause. To talk is to make music."
I'm a couple of chapters in and starting to get used to the style. Whether it was his intention to disorient/blur characters or not I think it will work well for this book but I'm glad it is an exception to the rule instead of the norm.
The author saying "to talk is to make music" makes me think of those dialogue heavy Elmore Leonard books where the conversations drive the story and the indentation between the two characters lines of speech really gives them two different voices. Those stories are so easy to read and on the page look polar opposite to Blindness.
If it's his gimmick, laziness or artistic expression it really doesn't matter as long as Saramago is telling good stories and it isn't taking the reader mentally away from the book.
I got the book from my library today and finished the first chapter. So many commas!
I'm looking forward to participating in my first GAF Book Club thread.
About 25 pages in. The writing style put me off a little at first, but I'm starting to adjust to the stream-of-consciousness type of writing. Reminiscent of Cormack McCarthy.
Started reading today, about 20 or so pages into, so many walls of texts which makes it a bit longer than I assumed it would be. I know the comparison to McCarthy was brought up, but I wish Saramago would at least try to separate some of the dialogues by lines instead of commas. The Road did this and made reading much easier.
about 2/3 through now and think this is totally amazing. there's some really grim stuff in here as the story progresses, dark explorations about how people can behave as society falls apart, but the way saramogo describes the blind struggling around holding onto eachother to navigate and how they live moment to moment in general creates powerful empathy for the people in there too.
i'm a bit miffed that the back of the book (uk, vintage) describes something that hasn't happened yet even though i'm deep into the book. though i guess this book isn't really so much about dramatic plot elements.
I'm around the same pages count, but the story already feels pretty grim to me. But now I'm dreading how much worse shit these blind people gonna go through.
okay i finished this today. i thought it was incredibly powerful and the kind of book that i couldn't help but rush through - despite this book club being a month long exercise - because i wasn't able to stop thinking about it when i wasn't reading it.
here's some rambly thoughts
there's quite a lot of fiction that deals with what humans can do to eachother when society falls apart and they become desperate to survive. it's pretty well worn out from studying lord of the flies at school to all the zombie fiction out there these days. however i think saramago does a bunch of things that makes this example of that so potent.
the first comes from the narrative voice. saramago might have used the tricks here in previous works, but there's a meshing of style and theme here that's so perfect. the unbroken passages, difficulty in discerning who is talking, lack of character names, relative sparsity of description, the non specific city, lack of chapter titles. these all dis-orientate the reader and help immerse you in a world where the characters can't depend on their main sense and have to learn to understand new ways of identifying things. i didn't find it too intimidating either, it gives the book a real immediacy and one of the things i found was that the faster you read the more you understood as the back and forth of the conversation echoes in your head and comes together naturally. the narration is also broadly unsentimental, it doesn't linger on awful scenes to extract melodrama just presents them to speak for themselves, yet it also is capable of showing real compassion at moments, the narrator will zoom in to pick out an image or an action or an exchange that's rarely cliche and always deeply human. there's a ton grim grim stuff in here but it's also married to moments of brief beauty, that makes it not so uncompromising a read. there's one with rain and one with a church that's both just oh my god.
that said i think this is fundamentally about human frailty and it's the introduction of physical frailty and the emphasis on just how vulnerable and dependent on eachother people can be that makes this depiction really feel unique and layered. saramago so thoroughly explores the concept, pulling zero punches bar the doctor's wife (see spoiler text) in depicting just how such a world would react and fall into place and whenever you think 'well what about not being able to see x' it gets covered. there's so many images of the blind navigating the world that breaks your heart. the actual psychological breakdown of the people as the established order collapses and you need to do what to survive is realized in a way that feels plausible and scary and not over the top. there's also grades of morality in here that are interesting, there will be big grand incredibly evil things happen, what happens when you say fuck it and revert to pure animal impulses to survive, but also you'll see a sort of banality of evil in how the main characters get so desensitized to what's happening as it progresses and even the characters that you follow will make little evil choices that you understand but are still quite bad if on a less overt way.
i went a bit back and forth on whether i liked the doctors's wife being able to see. i think it'd be a more relentless book without it, more pure in its depiction of the setting and there'd be more peril but i i think in the end i did like it. lots of stuff has a group of people you follow through the whole story, but i liked the miracle element showing the importance of pure luck. i liked it mirroring the readers' voyeuristic impulse of being able to see what's going on despite the characters stumbling around. i also thought the book delved into the futility being able to see when no-one else can by the final act. it felt as a choice it generally allowed the book's themes to resonate stronger and the book didn't lack for brutal and heartbreaking depictions of its world.
anyway good choice tragicomedy. look forward to being able to discuss more specifics when other people have finished.
I also finished tonight. I'll save my main commentary for the end of next week when others have gotten further along and/or finished. For now, I'll just say it's an excellent book that caused me a great deal of introspection, and also disturbed the heck out of me.
I'll cage my thoughts better and post more thorough (and spoilerish) commentary soon.
I'm 26% in according to my Kindle. I'm glad I'm not the only one who was put off by the writing style at first. I actually found myself wondering if I could keep going, but I'm glad I did. It's been intense so far. I found myself looking up from the Kindle grateful that I could see.
I'll probably finish it in the next day or so. I'm definitely glad I never saw the movie; I always like reading the book first.
Started on Blindness, I am about 50 pages in. It wasn't too difficult getting into the writing style, but I do have to reread a few lines at times. I saw the film when it first came out, so I am curious to see the differences between the two. I can already tell I'll like this much more due to narrator's voice.
Finished it today. Was my first non Kindle book in a couple of years believe it or not. Between that and the wall of text writing style he used it felt quite alien and actually worked well for the subject matter.
Strangely enjoyable book and will post more once we allow people to catch up.
Okay, my review as promised. I'll try to mark spoilers appropriately, but I'm assuming at this point that the central premise of the book is understood (it's the freaking title!).
Writing style: I found Saramago's writing style to swing like a pendulum back and forth between utilitarian and positively beautiful. His biggest strengths are the way he uses imagery to bring the world to life. It's fascinating how a book about people being unable to see can paint such beautiful pictures of such a grim world. The very concept of "white blindness" flies in the face of what we consider the condition to mean, almost as if the eyes or brain receptors are being overwhelmed by too much sensory input, instead of too little.
The conversational style was right up my alley, Cormac McCarthy Way. It's definitely more plain in nature, and I can see it being hit or miss for people. Some people probably dislike the style, but I love Saramago's description of it being short pauses (commas) and long pauses (periods) in dialogue. That rings true in my experience and I found it to be perfectly fitting to the book. One jarring issue for me was when characters, especially the doctor's wife, would drop quite deep and philosophical ideas into everyday conversation. It felt out of context, as if Saramago needed to breathe his admittedly brilliant insights into the world and basically had to force them into the story. I'm not complaining...I'm a Vonnegut fan, after all! But it's worth mentioning how out of place these deeper observations about life and the human condition felt amidst talk of people taking dumps in the courtyard.
Story: Simple in premise, complex and dark in execution. The story relies predominantly on its sole reliable narrator.
The story never reveals the cause of the blindness, which I believe is to its credit. There's certainly reason to question why people go blind and why they ultimately regain their vision. Did anyone else wonder if the condition was more psychosomatic than physical, even though the expression was all too real?
Saramago spends a lot of time developing a handful of characters, and they serve to illustrate how different people respond to the circumstances.
You have the logical doctor, the seasoned veteran with the black eye patch, the innocent boy with the squint, the emotionally jaded girl with the dark glasses, the proud (and sexist) first blind man, etc. The doctor's wife serves as the most impartial observer, clinging on to her sight and the desire to keep living like humans and not devolve into animals. Saramago writes a lot of himself in her character.
Why is the wife able to see when everyone else loses their vision? I understand it from a narration and story progression standpoint, but it doesn't really add up with the rules of the affliction. Why don't animals go blind? Why/how is vision restored later? I recognize there's a lot more meat to the story than the blindness, which is the vehicle that allows Saramago to examine human nature, but the lack of explanation is pretty infuriating.
I felt the story lost steam once they left the asylum. The tension dropped significantly, even if the characters faced many of the same dangers and survival struggles. The prison environment really exposed the best, and more often the worst of human behavior. The selfishness, greed, violence, and desire for complete control were devastating and largely disappeared post asylum.
Favorite quotes:
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.
"Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
"Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.
"When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.
"If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.
Just finished the book today. I'll be back to to post thoughts soon.
Edit: Just read Tragicomedy's post above, and I agree with alot of what was written, especially
How the story decreased in tension dramatically after everyone left the asylum. The asylum setting really gave the story as sense of claustrophobia that was beneficial. The story kind just stalled to a grinding halt after this, making the last 50 or so pages tough to get through for me
The writing style isn't a dealbreaker or anything. As a matter of fact, I found myself enjoying some aspects of it. I especially enjoyed it when there was a conversation going on between two of the characters, but when a group conversation started it became hard to follow. The style also allowed for tension to be raised quickly in a few sections. When Saramago started to interject his views and philosophies on humanity, I felt the novel became to rambling, due to the large blocks of text, and long run-on sentences.
I know there has been some Comparison to Cormac McCarthy (myself included), but I find McCarthy's style more enjoyable because it allows the novel to breathe (If that makes any sense. I'm having a difficult time describing this lol).
Overall, the novel does many things well. The characters are all well written and believable, and Saramago does a great job balancing between vivid imagery, and a bare bones type of dialogue. The story avoided tropes of the dystopian genre, and has a some interesting things to say. It's a tough novel to read at times, but is mostly worth the journey.
Great selection Tragicomedy! It wasn't the best novel I've read this year, but interesting and thought provoking in its own right. Defiantly something I would not have normally read, but am glad I did.
I know there has been some Comparison to Cormac McCarthy (myself included), but I find McCarthy's style more enjoyable because it allows the novel to breathe (If that makes any sense. I'm having a difficult time describing this lol)
Great selection Tragicomedy! It wasn't the best novel I've read this year, but interesting and thought provoking in its own right. Defiantly something I would not have normally read, but am glad I did.
Agreed regarding McCarthy. It's not really an apt comparison (though I made it), but more of a "closest thing I can think of" kind of deal.
Glad you liked the book and found it interesting, particularly since it's outside your usual reading list. That's always the mark of a successful book club choice.
Just curious if any of you guys had read Day Of The Triffids. Obviously it's tonally quite different. I didn't even think about it til the last third of Blindness when the tension really drops off.
Please keep doing these book clubs. I don't post in here until I've read the book. I may not have posted in the quiet american thread at all but I read the posts. I'm just saying I enjoy these threads and reading these books so far.
Why is the wife able to see when everyone else loses their vision? I understand it from a narration and story progression standpoint, but it doesn't really add up with the rules of the affliction. Why don't animals go blind? Why/how is vision restored later? I recognize there's a lot more meat to the story than the blindness, which is the vehicle that allows Saramago to examine human nature, but the lack of explanation is pretty infuriating.
I felt the story lost steam once they left the asylum. The tension dropped significantly, even if the characters faced many of the same dangers and survival struggles. The prison environment really exposed the best, and more often the worst of human behavior. The selfishness, greed, violence, and desire for complete control were devastating and largely disappeared post asylum.
Please keep doing these book clubs. I don't post in here until I've read the book. I may not have posted in the quiet american thread at all but I read the posts. I'm just saying I enjoy these threads and reading these books so far.
agreed.
Is Seeing worth reading? I added it to my readlist.
I'm about halfway through the novel, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. At one moment, I am speeding through it, and at the next, it's like I hit a brick wall and it takes ten minutes to get over it. Saramago's writing style is not my cup of tea, but I want to finish this novel before Words of Radiance comes out (it's a good thing I sped through a ton of novels in early February for the 50 book challenge).
I'm about halfway through the novel, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. At one moment, I am speeding through it, and at the next, it's like I hit a brick wall and it takes ten minutes to get over it. Saramago's writing style is not my cup of tea, but I want to finish this novel before Words of Radiance comes out (it's a good thing I sped through a ton of novels in early February for the 50 book challenge).
It's definitely worse than Blindness. I admit I didn't read it to the end, but that alone is saying something...
My recommendations if you liked Saramago and want to try other book by him:
-The Gospel according to Jesus Christ: if you like religious fiction. Saramago is communist so you know beforehand that religion isn't portrayed in a good light. Jesus is still the good guy, but everything else is turned on it's head.
One of my favorite chapters has an awesome long conversation about religion between Jesus and God.
There's also sort of a sequel about the Old Testament called 'Cain'
-Death with interruptions: it's closer to Blindness in tone/setting. In that case, people just stop dying. Chaos ensues.
-The Double: is a little thriller in which a man finds his double. Great pacing and interesting story. It's gonna be a movie soon (by the guy that directed Prisioners).
-Baltasar and Blimunda: it's set in 18th century Portugal. Mixes legend, history, and supernatural elements. It's an amazing book, but it may be harder to get into due to the setting. The descriptions of the lives of poor people and the terrors of the Inquisition are particularly brutal.
Btw, his best book is probably "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis", but it requires knowledge of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa to enjoy it completely.
I'm only sixty pages away from completing this novel. My feelings remain the same, sometime I am in love, other times I want to experience the same blindness. But I am happy to have read this work; I have been interested in it since I originally saw the film. Hoping to finish it sometime tomorrow or this weekend. Then it'll be time to read a short book, and then possibly attack Sanderson's new novel.
Finished Blindness yesterday. Love-hate relationship with the novel. You guys weren't kidding about the roughness of the book, in both content and writing (the latter is for me). I'm glad I read it, but I'll be avoiding Saramago's other novels.
It's definitely worse than Blindness. I admit I didn't read it to the end, but that alone is saying something...
My recommendations if you liked Saramago and want to try other book by him:
-The Gospel according to Jesus Christ: if you like religious fiction. Saramago is communist so you know beforehand that religion isn't portrayed in a good light. Jesus is still the good guy, but everything else is turned on it's head.
One of my favorite chapters has an awesome long conversation about religion between Jesus and God.
There's also sort of a sequel about the Old Testament called 'Cain'
-Death with interruptions: it's closer to Blindness in tone/setting. In that case, people just stop dying. Chaos ensues.
-The Double: is a little thriller in which a man finds his double. Great pacing and interesting story. It's gonna be a movie soon (by the guy that directed Prisioners).
-Baltasar and Blimunda: it's set in 18th century Portugal. Mixes legend, history, and supernatural elements. It's an amazing book, but it may be harder to get into due to the setting. The descriptions of the lives of poor people and the terrors of the Inquisition are particularly brutal.
Btw, his best book is probably "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis", but it requires knowledge of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa to enjoy it completely.
I was thisclose to picking Death With Interruptions over Blindness for the February book club. In hindsight, I think I made the right choice, but that one sounds almost equally as interesting.
