Kait
I started out really liking this. In a post-covid world, I think it's really interesting to re-examine something like this. Then once it stopped being the logistics of how people would initially respond to an epidemic and started being a survival story, it went very sharply downhill.
Let's address some things: I think this is pretty mired in ableism. Would society collapse if everyone went blind? Probably a bit. But blind people have been around for a very long time, and I'm really wondering if Jose Saramago did research with blind people advising him. He even states at one point, “Blindness is also this: to live in a world where all hope is gone.” I think there is a way to write about the pain and struggle of losing one of the senses without being so damn bleak and nihilistic.
There is also a lot of misogyny. The book was permeated with direct or indirect ways women were used or mistreated. Women are exclusively portrayed as wives, caretakers, or whores, sometimes in combination with each other. I almost had to stop reading during this plot where the women were taken for sex. Jose Saramago wrote this in a lot of detail and I really wanted to stop reading at this point. I really got annoyed when Saramago narratively pat himself on the back for making the glasses-wearing woman character, who he continually refers to as the GIRL in dark glasses so I thought she was a minor at first, concerned about her parents. Yes! Women can enjoy noncommittal sex and love their parents. Groundbreaking.
There were some silly things, like a guy dying of a leg infection in like two days. It would take way longer than that. I also think that leaving people in an asylum with no well person to run it is a bit crazy, too. Some people want power more than they are afraid of illness, and a military leader would've fit in here. I didn't see much talk about how the blindness spread, either, or any PPE which certainly existed at the time. Kind of crazy to have your main character be a doctor and write the least medically inquisitive ever.
I'm not sure why Saramago was so fixated on cleanliness and excrement. There are places all over the world where people don't have running water or much and they are able to keep clean. Saramago spent a lot of narrative work destroying individuality and community, which I guess would lead to these problems but I don't think it had to be like this.
He was also fixated on identity, which I know is some socialist thinking that he applied to this society, but it came off ableist as fuck. Does Saramago think blind people don't have a sense of identity? I kind of understood what he was doing with this, but I don't think it worked in this setting. This is a more ungenerous take for me, but I didn't think it fit in with the story.
I don't know if I have different opinions about society than Jose Saramago or what, but I found a lot of the Marxism over the top and unrealistic. This is supposed to be a study of societal breakdown, but somehow, even though there are only three women and basically everyone else on page is male, this book feels more like a study of women, by someone who has never spoken to a woman. Even the woman who has been surviving on her own is a “witch”. Every woman is immediately generalized by the narrative. The scene toward the end where all the ladies are sitting around talking about whether or not they're beautiful was like… so vapid and dumb.
I thought the scene where the wife finds all the creepy shit in the church was pretty cool, it was annoying that we had to hear the thoughts of some kind of writer character instead of exploring that.
Overall I see the exploration of the degradation of society, but this story was so damn patriarchal and misogynist that I couldn’t overlook it to see the bigger commentary on society as a whole. There’s a sequel that, during the first half of the book, I thought I’d want to check out to see the aftermath, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to read Jose Saramago’s thoughts on anything else. 2.5 stars, because I thought the first half was really interesting and I really, really hated almost all of everything past the 55% mark or so.
I started out really liking this. In a post-covid world, I think it's really interesting to re-examine something like this. Then once it stopped being the logistics of how people would initially respond to an epidemic and started being a survival story, it went very sharply downhill.
Let's address some things: I think this is pretty mired in ableism. Would society collapse if everyone went blind? Probably a bit. But blind people have been around for a very long time, and I'm really wondering if Jose Saramago did research with blind people advising him. He even states at one point, “Blindness is also this: to live in a world where all hope is gone.” I think there is a way to write about the pain and struggle of losing one of the senses without being so damn bleak and nihilistic.
There is also a lot of misogyny. The book was permeated with direct or indirect ways women were used or mistreated. Women are exclusively portrayed as wives, caretakers, or whores, sometimes in combination with each other. I almost had to stop reading during this plot where the women were taken for sex. Jose Saramago wrote this in a lot of detail and I really wanted to stop reading at this point. I really got annoyed when Saramago narratively pat himself on the back for making the glasses-wearing woman character, who he continually refers to as the GIRL in dark glasses so I thought she was a minor at first, concerned about her parents. Yes! Women can enjoy noncommittal sex and love their parents. Groundbreaking.
There were some silly things, like a guy dying of a leg infection in like two days. It would take way longer than that. I also think that leaving people in an asylum with no well person to run it is a bit crazy, too. Some people want power more than they are afraid of illness, and a military leader would've fit in here. I didn't see much talk about how the blindness spread, either, or any PPE which certainly existed at the time. Kind of crazy to have your main character be a doctor and write the least medically inquisitive ever.
I'm not sure why Saramago was so fixated on cleanliness and excrement. There are places all over the world where people don't have running water or much and they are able to keep clean. Saramago spent a lot of narrative work destroying individuality and community, which I guess would lead to these problems but I don't think it had to be like this.
He was also fixated on identity, which I know is some socialist thinking that he applied to this society, but it came off ableist as fuck. Does Saramago think blind people don't have a sense of identity? I kind of understood what he was doing with this, but I don't think it worked in this setting. This is a more ungenerous take for me, but I didn't think it fit in with the story.
I don't know if I have different opinions about society than Jose Saramago or what, but I found a lot of the Marxism over the top and unrealistic. This is supposed to be a study of societal breakdown, but somehow, even though there are only three women and basically everyone else on page is male, this book feels more like a study of women, by someone who has never spoken to a woman. Even the woman who has been surviving on her own is a “witch”. Every woman is immediately generalized by the narrative. The scene toward the end where all the ladies are sitting around talking about whether or not they're beautiful was like… so vapid and dumb.
I thought the scene where the wife finds all the creepy shit in the church was pretty cool, it was annoying that we had to hear the thoughts of some kind of writer character instead of exploring that.
Overall I see the exploration of the degradation of society, but this story was so damn patriarchal and misogynist that I couldn’t overlook it to see the bigger commentary on society as a whole. There’s a sequel that, during the first half of the book, I thought I’d want to check out to see the aftermath, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to read Jose Saramago’s thoughts on anything else. 2.5 stars, because I thought the first half was really interesting and I really, really hated almost all of everything past the 55% mark or so.