From Nobel Prize–winning author José Saramago, a magnificent, mesmerizing parable of loss
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 her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.
José de Sousa Saramago (16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Portuguese novelist and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." His works, some of which have been seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist a…
Read more
