Blindness
Published on 4. April 2013
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-0-09-957358-6 (ISBN)
Description
No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order.
Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers.
A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.
It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped.
This is not anarchy, this is blindness.
'Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet' Independent
Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers.
A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.
It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped.
This is not anarchy, this is blindness.
'Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet' Independent
Reviews / Votes
Extraordinary...a tour de force of thought-experiment and feeling-experiment * Observer * This is a shattering work by a literary master...a book of real stature * Boston Globe * Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet. * Independent * He writes a prose of particularly luminous intensity, brilliantly rendered into English by his regular translator Giovanni Pontiero...Sweepingly ambitious * The Times * A powerful fable * Scotsman * Saramago's exuberant imagination, capriciousness and clear-sightedness find full expression in this engaging work Blistering, unrelenting, horrifying, yet still somehow luminously redemptive * White Review, *Books of the Year* *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 128 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
233 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-09-957358-6 (9780099573586)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Person
Jose Saramago is one of the most important international writers of the last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922, he was in his sixties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Saramago died in June 2010.