Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira
1995
- blind
- blindness
- fiction
- modern literature
- allegories
- psychological fiction
- psychology
- epidemics
- survival
- blind in literature
The story
Uma cegueira branca se espalha de forma fulminante. Internados em quarentena ou perdidos pela cidade, os cegos devem enfrentar o que há de mais primitivo na espécie humana: a vontade de sobreviver à qualquer custo. José Saramago, vencedor do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura de 1998, tece uma aterrorizante parábola sobre o ser humano, que revela o que há de pior em nós mesmos.
What it’s like
Dense, unbroken paragraphs with no quotation marks, where dialogue runs on in long comma-spliced chains and the narrator's voice drifts like a wry witness at the edge of the scene. The sensory world is claustrophobic and physical: the milky white of a sudden blindness that fills the eyes like fog, the stench of crowded wards, rot, unwashed bodies, hunger, rain on closed windows, and the constant strain of listening and feeling one's way through rooms. Its mood is bleak, unsparing and allegorical, a slow-burning unease that tightens rather than lurches. The intensity is high: sexual violence, cruelty and degradation are depicted directly and sometimes graphically, and the dread is sustained rather than relieved by spectacle. Pacing is relentless, with long stretches of accumulating horror punctuated by flickers of solidarity and decency. The arc follows a small group of ordinary people, a doctor's wife who conceals her sight among them, as they are stripped of order and dignity and forced to decide what they will become. This suits readers who want a serious, uncomfortable philosophical novel, not gentle comfort reading, and is best approached in a steady, attentive state rather than late at night or as a light escape. For readers drawn to moral allegory, unflinching human portraits, and prose that demands full concentration.
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