Product Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting 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.

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

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 401 reviews)

Great book by S. Hughes (Edmonds, WA USA)

5 Stars
November 08, 2009
This is a really intense novel. It deals with a country that has every single person go blind within a short amount of time except for one woman. The way that Saramago describes the conditions that the people begin to live in is so realistic and believable. It really seems that it could happen and for that fact it is scary. The nature of humanity is a really strange thing. This is now one of my favorite books and it has impulsed me to start reading Jose Saramago's other works. The writing style he has is hard to get used to at first. He doesn't use quotation marks and also often uses commas in place of periods so many sentences run on quite a while. Great book though.

... by A. Ahmed

3 Stars
October 17, 2009
came pretty quickly, earlier than expected. cover was wrong. would have been a waste to return it, so i kept it.

Blindness by M1 (Seattle, WA United States)

4 Stars
October 12, 2009
Well written, but "brutally" realistic - the struggle of human "good" over human "evil" when society's security net no longer exists. Would "good" exist without vision in a blind society? One hopes it would, but the book makes you pause.

What a price! by Lianfei Shan

5 Stars
September 28, 2009
The cheapest book I have ever bought. It is almost impossible. The condition of the book is very good, just as the description says. The delivery was very fast also. Thank you guys!

Levels of Blindness by Jason Gansauer (Phoenix AZ)

4 Stars
September 28, 2009
It is to the author's purpose to create four principal characters: a youth with a squint; a young woman with dark glasses; and an old man with a patch over his eye. Youth can barely focus, adulthood tries to soften the glare of reality; old age faces the rest of life only half-sighted. Contrast these three and the rest of humanity with the principal character who retains her sight while everyone else is blind.

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