Blindness

A city is struck by an epidemic of white blindness. The infected are quarantined. Society collapses. One woman, inexplicably immune, keeps her eyes open and watches what people become when all structures fail. Blindness is Saramago’s most urgent novel, and the right place to begin.

Why Start Here

Blindness has the propulsive quality of a thriller and the moral weight of a parable. The premise is stark and the implications are immediate: what happens to human dignity when the systems that enforce it disappear? Saramago does not look away from the answer, and it is not comforting.

This is also the novel where Saramago’s unusual style, no quotation marks, long flowing paragraphs, a narrator who occasionally interrupts, feels most natural. The stripped-back prose matches the stripped-back world inside the quarantine, and the absence of individual names (characters are called “the doctor’s wife,” “the first blind man”) gives the story a fable-like quality that sharpens rather than distances its impact.

What to Expect

Long, unbroken paragraphs and chapters without section breaks. Allow yourself to slow down and find Saramago’s rhythm, it takes perhaps thirty pages before the style starts to feel inevitable rather than effortful. The novel is harrowing in places, but the doctor’s wife is one of literature’s great moral centres, and following her through the dark is the whole point.