Dialogue flows in and out of the runaway paragraphs with no discerning attributes to identify speakers other than its content-its sound. There are no breaks or syntax unique to each character’s speech in Saramago’s prose. And soon too, the blindness spreads to the reader. The story starts out with a simple enough car accident and slowly beings to weave together a hodgepodge of characters- the ophthalmologist, the prostitute, the car thief, the dog of tears - around an connected fate. The novel, in which the blindness experienced by many is not the absence of light but an all shrouding whiteness, feels like a sci fi tale reeling from a paucity of fantasy -it is terrifyingly positioned squarely within the bounds of possible, but so far from everyday imagination that it tugs at the foundations of being. So when an entire city in Portugal goes blind – an epidemic of sorts, the country fears – what is uncovered? What new city rests darkened underneath the lights of the old? Enter the world of José Saramago’s Blindness, a neutered apocalypse, a plague without name, as simple in its onset, as it is devastating and meticulous in its effect. But it is inevitably more than that, it is an entirely new reality of heightened sense, an uncovering what was so often overlooked or ignored. If perception is reality, the loss of perception is nothing short of an existential crisis.
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