Cecità (Universale economica) (Italian Edition)

Unlike Lord of the Flies ' exciting story which I loved , I had a big problem with the pacing of this book. You'd expect a lot of crazy things to be happening, right? Well, after the first people to go blind were forced into an abandoned mental hospital by the government… nothing much happened. For pages and pages, they talked about sharing food rations, how they couldn't trust anyone, and complained about how dirty the hospital was.

Also, the writing fused all sentences and dialogue together into lengthy paragraphs that seemed endless. There were literally no quotation marks when people were talking. You could call this style "unique," and I get it - the messy and confusing writing emphasized how the blind inmates must have felt. Sadly, though, this style didn't work for me and only caused me to feel extremely bored. This highly philosophical study just wasn't what I was looking for, though I'm sure many others would love it.

This is the only book recommended by John Darnielle on his good reads page and that is why I read it but I would rather read his novel Wolf in White Van than this one. View all 3 comments. Well what to say about this one? For a Nobel prize winning author winning author, I thought it was pretty poor and totally graphic.

I think possibly it was because of the stream of consciousness type writing which was very avant- garde. The author put us all through a type of hell reading of the debasement of man through the sickness of white blindness. There was really no redeeming value of this treatise and one is mentally, physically, and emotionally bombarded with all the baser elements of ma Well what to say about this one?

There was really no redeeming value of this treatise and one is mentally, physically, and emotionally bombarded with all the baser elements of man. I found it all gruesome, and gave it two stars only because of the way Saramango was able to invoke powerful although abhorant images. Let me start by saying how ridiculous it feels to critique the work of an author deemed worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Now that I've gotten that out of the way, the book was disappointing. First, the prose ostensibly serves as a device to mirror the blindness experienced by the characters populating the book, in that it is problematic to easily discern who among the characters is speaking to whom, and from who's point of view the descriptions are offered.

While certainly interesting a Let me start by saying how ridiculous it feels to critique the work of an author deemed worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature. While certainly interesting as a device, I found the execution clumsy. The narrator's perspective alternates from one of omniscience including, apparently with regard to time AND place to the fellow blind-stricken without much rhyme or reason. Is this a deliberate tactic or is the author lost himself?

Dunno, but it became distracting, and my hunch is that this was not intentional. Otherwise, the key conflicts feel contrived. Unlike, say, The Plague, the novel's early dramatic tension is set up by the seemingly arbitrary desire of certain characters, namely a group of ward members suddenly deciding to become total assholes. I understand that the author is trying to say something about the nature of people when stricken with "the blindness of fear", etc.

After two days, would anyone but the most sociopathic begin hoarding food and belongings, and come up with an intricate rape calendar? Why are certain members given to this behavior and others' not? Are the distinctions between "good" and "evil" in people so easily made in Saragamo's view? Finally, the action of the story was only intermittingly entertaining.

After reading the first few pages that follow the exile from the ward or is it liberation? But again, Saragamo misses the chance to explore the moral ambivalence that would most certainly accompany most human's were they to share in her experience. Instead, one concludes from the story that certain among us are capable of transcending the darker elements within us, and are as morally pure as the white-driven snow that blinds the rest of us.

I can deal with the lack of punctuation and the weird rambly sentence structure. It's not my favorite style, but sometimes it works. I can deal with the wall-of-text never ending paragraphs and the lack of plot info to start. Maybe it's a slow build to something good?

What I cannot deal with is zero character progression I tried. What I cannot deal with is zero character progression. Give me a single remarkable character trait, any inkling of depth, or hell, any sign that the characters mean something. Also, I can't shake a sense of pervasive boredom, sinking like a milky sea over my brain whenever I try to read this. We weren't meant to be. Entonces empiezan a encerrar a los ciegos en diversos centros de aislamiento, de cuarentena. No nos equivoquemos, la idea es buena, pero veo, nunca mejor dicho, a la persona que mueve los hilos, al que se esconde tras la voz del Mago de Oz.

Rating this book on a scale was very difficult because it was, strangely, a book that I thought was phenomenally good but I would never recommend to anyone. Before I get into what turned me off I should mention Saramago's gimmick. Sometimes an author will center his book around a literary gimmick or at least make it a major feature of the work.

Saramago, in Blindness , omits almos Rating this book on a scale was very difficult because it was, strangely, a book that I thought was phenomenally good but I would never recommend to anyone. Saramago, in Blindness , omits almost all punctuation save for the occasional comma, apostrophe, or period. He also does not typically separate paragraphs.

The result is that all the text and dialog runs together in a uniform block on each page. The static appearance of the pages is meant, I believe, to make the reader sympathetic to the stricken vision of the characters. I figured this out pretty early in the book and afterwards the lack of punctuation started to become annoying. I get it, I thought; you don't have to beat me over the head with it.

Then, much later in the book, I realized what else he was doing. He never uses names in the novel. There are no "Barbara said," or "shouted Jake" phrases. You begin to figure out who is talking by listening to the characters' "voices" as they speak - which is how the blind inmates recognize each other as well. The other thing that I enjoyed about this book is that it is essentially post-apocalypse fiction, which I love.

Saramago makes a believable, honest description of a breakdown of industrialized society, the re-structuring of rules when we're reduced to just surviving. I always enjoy watching the character development of simple house wives and taxi drivers in that setting. It was beautifully done. And now to what turned me off from this novel.

About half-way into the story, there is a chapter that consists of an extremely graphic description of a gang rape. There are several victims and they are all key characters in the book. By this point, the reader has gotten to know them fairly well. The abuse they suffer is very detailed and beyond repugnant. It's offensive and gratuitous. These are my issues with that chapter: He was doing an excellent job of portraying them as inhuman without the rape scene.

The reader already knows that the thugs are capable of starving their fellow inmates to death for no other reason than greed and the pleasure of inflicting suffering. Dozens of earlier chapters have already shown the reader how debased these people have become. The rape scene was unnecessary. Using something as reprehensible and sickeningly graphic as a gang rape to pull an emotional response out of the reader is just lazy writing. It's like you're watching a movie, and in the first scene where they show the villain, he crosses the street and stomps on a puppy.

It's simply not good writing - that sort of scene does not require any effort to make the reader hate the character. Any hack writer can do that. It would have been a better test of skill to elicit the same response by another means. The rest of the novel is evidence enough that Saramago is an excellent writer - I don't know what happened to him in that chapter. The women submit to the assault because they are starving, the thugs hold the food, and the women and other inmates will not be allowed to eat unless they submit. It is understood that this sort of "trade" will be required any time they want to eat.

The women resignedly agree to the terms with little discussion, as well as their men. I can say without doubt that I would never, ever ask a woman I loved to allow herself to be gang raped so that I could eat, even if I were starving. I don't know many men who would say different after serious consideration. Saramago would argue that we never know how we would respond under threat of starvation, but I just don't buy it.

That's an underhanded argument anyways since most of us have never been starved. I can say for certain that I would rather fight and die trying to defend myself and my loved ones - there are fates worse than death.

Cecità by José Saramago (2 star ratings)

Also, one of the female inmates has her sight and is armed - she has a tremendous tactical advantage over the blind aggressors. She could kill or at least maim each one of them at her leisure and yet she doesn't. She is raped and the other female inmates suffer the same. Saramago fails to give a convincing argument as to why she didn't defend herself. I read mostly for entertainment and education, and the graphic description of this horrible scene really ruined the book for me.

It made me sick to my stomach and that's saying something coming from a paramedic. I am inclined, however, to mistrust my judgment due to my strong emotional response to the chapter. I also realize that I was not particularly offended by the other acts of violence and suffering in the novel.

It is possible that I'm a bit of a hypocrite and a chauvinist. So, if you don't think you'd be particularly bothered by that scene, you should definitely pick up this book. It does at least have a happy ending. Lock up a few hundred helpless blind people for weeks in a dilapidated building with non-working facilities, restrict their food and deny medical care, and what do you think will happen? They will devolve to living in their own filth exactly like pigs, fighting over the limited food, raping women, and killing each other to survive.

I mean, if you accept the premise that these people really are there, really are completely helpless, and can't escape, the result is inevitable, Lock up a few hundred helpless blind people for weeks in a dilapidated building with non-working facilities, restrict their food and deny medical care, and what do you think will happen? I mean, if you accept the premise that these people really are there, really are completely helpless, and can't escape, the result is inevitable, it's human nature. It doesn't matter whether you're a PhD doctor or a car thief, you will do what it takes to survive.

Sure, there will usually be a saint or two, and Saramago obligingly provided one to make this religious allegory complete. Reading Blindness you will hear clear echoes of many of them. We are inundated with this everywhere, from pulp novels, to summer blockbuster movies, to religious texts and even self-help prescriptions.

What new understanding does Saramago bring to this particular dystopian tale? Nevertheless, he believes readers will want to tolerate pages of the sparcest prose to tell us so, so slowly this often-told story of the inherent sin of humanity. In Saramago's novel, nothing is left out of the degeneration, from the arrival of the first inmate, through all the disgusting details, until they all escape after a fire fires of Hell destroys the facility.

From that point there still remain pages. It's not a spoiler to expect this part to be the Redemption. Imagine lots of blind people stumbling around in a city in the pouring rain trying to find food, and to poop and pee what IS it with Saramago's obsession with that? McCarthy's The Road came strongly to my mind here. Granted, Blindness preceded that book by twenty years, but J.

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Ballard has similar earlier texts. Just when you think you can make it to the finish, it comes: At that point I had had enough. And yet, the buckets of rain come back several times before the end: Our sinners collect it in basins and perform thorough ritual cleansings, as in: I know Saramago is a Nobel Prize winner, and I'm not. Still, what he produced in this novel reads just like an assignment in a creative writing class: For what the book did for my imagination nothing and what I learned from it nothing it rates one star.

Saramago did his class assignment perfectly so I'll reluctantly bump it to two stars. This book is terrible. I have no idea why anyone would want to subject themselves to Saramago's reveries on human degradation. There is also more shitting, walking barefoot through shit, crawling in shit, etc. I don't need pages of sunshine and flowers, and I'm willing to slog through some unpleasantness if there's some sort This book is terrible. I don't need pages of sunshine and flowers, and I'm willing to slog through some unpleasantness if there's some sort of literary payoff, but this was just pointless.

It's as if Cormac McCarthy had written a novel about latrines. The characters are totally blank deliberately left nameless, faceless , so the whole thing reads like an allegory without depth or purpose. I seriously can't conceive of what possessed anyone to give this guy a Nobel Prize. Is it somehow that much better in Portuguese? Me gusta esa forma de Saramago de construir una novela. I'm relieved to be done with this and happy to be moving on to things that probably will interest me more.

It's an intelligent book with something to say. But nothing really worked for me Maybe it was the translation? Redeemed by a few searing and tragic images, but not much else to recommend here. Now I can read something good. This book is one of those high brow, unconventional, yet well written, pretentious, philosophical, bull crap laced kinds of books I had to read when I was in school.

Oh, and speaking of crap… this book is full of it. View all 4 comments.

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Fernando Meirelles who also directed two wonderful films, Cidade de Deus and The Constant Gardener, was directing the adaptation. The man who helpe him get to his house -- then later stole the blind man's car -- he too was struck blind. Then the first blind man and his wife went to see an eye doctor. The doctor found nothing wrong with the first blind man's eyes.

The first blind man's wife went blind. The doctor went blind. Some patients who were in the doc's waiting room also went blind. The blindness is contagious. Ain't that a kick in the teeth? Close your eyes for a minute. Nothing but darkness, right? Well, these people, they didn't see darkness. The government went into immediate action. They lock these blind people in a nuthouse, where they later lived like animals in captivity. The government also put soldiers to guard them. These soldiers were scared by the blinds and at first their fingers were twitchy.

They shot quite a few people. There were hoodlums in the asylum. They didn't share the food supply. A blind sociopath with a gun. You read me correctly. King decreed if the others wanted food, they had to pay him and his boys. First they demanded jewelries and stuff. Then they demanded women. You must be thinking, Well, how did these poor souls got by? Don't they have anyone who help them?

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The eye doctor's wife. She pretended to be blind so she could protect her husband. She didn't know she had scissors in her bag. A blind woman, a character who appeared out of nowhere, who happened to have a lighter with her, set the barricades on fire. The Doc's Wife led the blinds out. The gates were unlocked. There were no more soldiers. The whole city, maybe the whole country, already went blind.

Doc's Wife led her husband and her new "family" -- The girl with dark glasses, the boy with squint, the man with eyepatch to her old flat. The Doc's Wife washed their clothes and shoes. Then she and the girl with dark glasses took a shower under the rain. Doc's Wife also washed Eyepatch Guy under the rain. As sudden as it came, one by one the blind victims began to be able to see. First the girl with dark glasses. Other than Doc's Wife, of course. I think this is her story. Her 'trial', so to speak.

No, I don't think it's the translators's fault. For example page , "It was not just the fetid smell that came from the lavatories in gusts that made you want to throw up, it was also the accumulated body odour of two hundred and fifty people whose bodies were steeped in their own sweat who were neither able nor know how to wash themselves, who wore clothes that got filthier by the day, who slept in beds they had frequently defecated In a novel, it's not enough.

You got to break 'em down event by event or incident by incident. Be it on the asylum's hallway or on the street of a dying city, during a heavy rain. View all 13 comments. This is not a great novel. It is an interesting premise, initially well reported, that deteriorates into a sadist's fun house that gets burned down and turns its former occupants into half-witted philosophers of sightlessness. It feels as though Jose Saramago conceived of Blindness and began writing it in a straight-forward way with only a few postmodern quirks - like naming none of his characters.

Soon enough, though, Saramago leaped to the end of his work and discovered he had something ingeniu This is not a great novel. Soon enough, though, Saramago leaped to the end of his work and discovered he had something ingenius to impart about what blindness says about, who knows, society or individuals or society that comprises individuals or individuals that comprise society or something else circular and profound-looking.

Then he asked himself, "But how will I shock these desensitized contemporary folks into absorbing my ingenious commentary? I must shock them! In very many ways the middle of this book feels like a violation of the reader's trust.

In a word, it is gratuitous. Saramago puts his characters in a mental ward and tortures them. He starves them, covers them with others' excrement, sets them to crawling about on their bellies and then robs them. Of a sudden, Saramago organizes a band of wicked blind people that arm themselves. First they demand the valuables of the other internees in exchange for food. How did these folks organize and why? What are blind people interned in a mental ward going to do with gold watches? Then the answer comes: They are going to use this robbery as a leaping-off point for the story's apex.

That apex, lamentably enough, is the graphic raping of the ward's women. In detail that betrays both genius and something more sinister, Saramago subjects seven women to the bestial attacks of 19 men for at least eight hours. Then Saramago marches them, broken, covered in blood and semen, and in one case dead, out of one room and back to their husbands and companions.

It is not until much later, in the book's last quarter, when Saramago describes the way the rain gloriously runs over a woman's pubis, that the reader is offered an ugly insight: Saramago enjoyed penning the details of the rape scenes. A better editor might have concealed this more effectively, since Saramago obviously couldn't.

The first third of this novel is intriguing. The second third of this novel is horrifying. The last third of this novel is insipid. By the final fifty pages, a reader is left wishing the characters, still nameless, had lost use of their vocal cords instead of their eyes. They play words games and talk in circles and impart silly things like "blindness is not death; but death is blindness", over and over and over. Saramago is a talented writer, no doubt. But his talents are used in ugly ways more often than not.

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And as he's not a talented philosopher, his novel might have been better served by cutting away most of the rape scenes, restoring everyone's eyes quicker and setting the characters to the adventurous task of rebuilding their society - quietly - in the book's final third. But like Cormac McCarthy before him, Saramago enjoys apocalyptic sadism far too much to worry about redemptive details. This book is a little more tolerable when you can't see the lack of paragraph breaks, periods, and quotation marks but I still didn't like it very much.

It just doesn't make any sense If the first blind man really was the first blind man - then why toss him into an mental institution as a makeshift quarentine? Instead, they use an outdated, abandoned mental institution with few This book is a little more tolerable when you can't see the lack of paragraph breaks, periods, and quotation marks but I still didn't like it very much.

Instead, they use an outdated, abandoned mental institution with few sanitary facilities, no cleaning supplies or even clean water? How is that supposed to halt the spread of this disease? They don't even know the disease vector at this point, so how are they to know this will contain the disease? Presumably, the institution's sewers are hooked up to the main city plumbing - so if the disease can be transmitted via fecal matter, that's a disaster waiting to happen.

Why don't doctors try to study the first group of blind people to figure out what's causing this and get a cure? Why don't they at least keep them in a humane quarantine? Telephones to talk to loved ones. Why cut off contact with the outside world? And why would the patients defecate in their own beds? The premise behind them doing so in the hallways is that no one can see them, so there's no way into shaming them to do it elsewhere But in their own beds?

Where they have to lie in it? I don't believe that for a second. And I really hated the ending Overnight, everyone can see! Never mind that people caught the blindness months apart. They all are "cured" within 24 hours! And now everything is just fine! Please select Ok if you would like to proceed with this request anyway.

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