PDF Download Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago
The book Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago will certainly constantly offer you good worth if you do it well. Completing guide Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago to read will certainly not end up being the only objective. The goal is by getting the good worth from guide up until the end of guide. This is why; you need to learn more while reading this Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago This is not only how quick you review a publication and not only has the number of you finished the books; it has to do with what you have actually gotten from guides.
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago
PDF Download Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago
How if your day is started by reviewing a publication Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago But, it is in your gadget? Everybody will certainly always touch and us their gizmo when waking up and also in early morning tasks. This is why, we mean you to likewise check out a book Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago If you still puzzled how to obtain the book for your gadget, you could adhere to the means here. As here, we provide Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago in this site.
As understood, journey as well as experience about lesson, home entertainment, and expertise can be acquired by only reviewing a publication Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago Also it is not straight done, you could recognize even more concerning this life, concerning the globe. We offer you this correct and also very easy way to get those all. We offer Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago as well as numerous book collections from fictions to scientific research whatsoever. One of them is this Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago that can be your companion.
Just what should you assume a lot more? Time to obtain this Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago It is easy then. You can only sit as well as remain in your area to obtain this book Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago Why? It is on the internet publication store that provide numerous collections of the referred books. So, merely with internet connection, you can appreciate downloading this publication Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago and varieties of publications that are searched for currently. By going to the link page download that we have provided, guide Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago that you refer so much can be located. Merely conserve the requested book downloaded and install and afterwards you could enjoy the book to check out whenever and place you really want.
It is really simple to read guide Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago in soft file in your gadget or computer. Again, why must be so tough to obtain guide Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago if you can pick the less complicated one? This web site will ease you to choose and select the most effective collective publications from one of the most ideal seller to the launched publication lately. It will constantly upgrade the collections time to time. So, attach to internet and visit this website always to get the new book everyday. Currently, this Blindness (Harvest Book), By Jose Saramago is all yours.
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.
- Sales Rank: #16735 in Books
- Brand: Harvest Books
- Published on: 1999-10-04
- Released on: 1999-10-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .94" w x 5.31" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
Features
Amazon.com Review
In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.
In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.
Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.
And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly
Brilliant Portuguese fabulist Saramago (The History of the Siege of Lisbon) has never shied away from big game. His previous works have rewritten the history of Portugal, reimagined the life of Christ and remodeled a continent by cleaving the Iberian peninsula from Europe and setting it adrift. Here, Saramago stalks two of our oldest themes in the tale of a plague of blindness that strikes an unnamed European city. At the novel's opening, a driver sits in traffic, waiting for the light to change. By the time it does, his field of vision is white, a "milky sea." One by one, each person the man encounters?the not-so-good Samaritan who drives him home, the man's wife, the ophthalmologist, the patients waiting to see the ophthalmologist?is struck blind. Like any inexplicable contagion, this plague of "white sickness" sets off panic. The government interns the blind, as well as those exposed to them, in an abandoned mental hospital guarded by an army with orders to shoot any detainee who tries to escape. Like Camus, to whom he cannot help being compared, Saramago uses the social disintegration of people in extremis as a crucible in which to study the combustion of our vices and virtues. As order at the mental hospital breaks down and the contagion spreads, the depraved overpower the decent. When the hospital is consumed in flames, the fleeing internees find that everyone has gone blind. Sightless people rove in packs, scavenging for food, sleeping wherever they can. Throughout the narrative, one character remains sighted, the ophthalmologist's wife. Claiming to be blind so she may be interned with her husband, she eventually becomes the guide and protector for an improvised family. Indeed, she is the reader's guide and stand-in, the repository of human decency, the hero, if such an elaborate fable can have a hero. Even after so many factual accounts of mass cruelty, this most sophisticated fiction retains its peculiar power to move and persuade. Editor, Drenka Willen. (Sept.) FYI: Paperback editions of The History of the Siege of Lisbon and Baltasar and Blimunda will be issued simultaneously.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
To describe as allegory this story of unnamed characters in an unnamed city who are struggling with an undiagnosed epidemic of "white blindness" is both too simple and too complex. Beyond any emblematic purpose, the characters act out life with all its paradoxes and hidden truths. Ultimately, the greater meaning here is the simple story of human frailty and community in the modern world. In searing prose, both complex and minimal, all this and nothing more is revealed. No wonder Saramago won the Nobel prize this year.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
If You Were The Only One...
By M. DeKalb
A bizarre, apparently contagious form of blindness, termed `white blindness' or the `white sickness' has begun effecting people starting with the initial contractor and spreading to those person he encounters and likewise in typical chain fashion.
The government takes steps to quarantine the blind and the potentially infected to ensure the contagion doesn't spread. Much of the first half of the book revolves around the horrors the blind suffer while they're in quarantine.
Amongst the blind is a sighted woman who, with the best of intentions snuck in with her husband feigning blindness herself. While letting nobody know she's sighted she assists to the best of her ability while the Army attempts to keep the blind caught inside the once abandoned asylum.
This is essentially a detailing of the moral vicissitudes of humanity. Here we witness thievery, rape, moral depravity, fear, lust, joy.
Once on the outside the escapees find the world in a similar state only upon a larger magnitude.
A very interesting story, and justifiably a Nobel winner.
Some aspects that are quite potent are the apocalyptic theorem: "What if" the world went blind and you were the only sighted person left?
There are a multitude of philosophical tenants however it seems predominantly existential in that it's a survival story where people make the most of their disability or cease to be.
The absurdist quality of what occurs strikes only on the surface but the moral depth revealed, which not one of the characters seems ultimately concerned about, shows how existentially based the story truly is.
The writing style itself is unique. No proper names, very little punctuation and only capital letters to indicate where another person begins speaking. I swear the comma and quotation don't really exist in this work.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A Serious Disquisition into the Human Condition
By Susan Harrison
Starting with a dystopian premise in which everyone is afflicted with a 'white blindness', Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago creates a disquisition into the human condition. What makes us human? How very fragile is veneer of civilization, civility, decency? In breathtaking language, Saramago observes the human condition as it unfolds in various conditions. He also creates a chilling allegory of the 20th century. Are we blind? Do we not see what we do to others? Do we not see what we are doing to our world? Do we just not see? From chilling cruelty and violence to a heart-rending examinations of love and beauty. Sight alone does not make us human, but the insight that defines the categories that we ordinarily use to understand who we are and our responsibilities to one another and our environment is thoroughly vested in this sense.
Not an easy read, but the beautiful language (even in the most terrifying passages) makes the journey abundantly worthwhile.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
How to be Blind.
By J.P.P.
A very interesting book. Apparently, the author did not live to finish it, but only the very ending is missing - and by then, everything important has been handled.
The book is about the spread of a disease that leaves its victims blind. The author effectively tells the story, giving the reader a heavy dose of the frustration and despair that one would go through becoming suddenly completely blind. The book is written in a difficult style - few discernable paragraphs, it can be difficult to follow dialogue. This may simply be a matter of the book having been a first draft, but as I thought about it, it was also a very effective way to tell a story about people who could no longer use normal visual cues to guide them. If the form was intended, it is brilliant. If it is an accident of the author's untimely demise, it is serendipity.
See all 724 customer reviews...
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago PDF
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago EPub
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago Doc
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago iBooks
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago rtf
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago Mobipocket
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago Kindle
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago PDF
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago PDF
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago PDF
Blindness (Harvest Book), by Jose Saramago PDF
