r/books • u/todaysgamer • 1d ago
Blindness by José Saramago : honest review by an amateur reader.
I just completed the book "Blindness" by José Saramago. The book was a gift by a friend so out of respect I had to read it. Like for every other read I go online to search for non-spoiler reviews so that I know what I am getting into and the reviews for "Blindness" were quite positive in reddit.
I just completed the book and I am surprised how did anyone find pleasure or insight into this and why is this book as popular as it is. To keep it brief I found the book to be absurd, lacking good storylines and the author cannot stop himself talking about excrements and young woman sleeping with different old men, makes me think that's probably what he wanted for himself.
Though the book does a good job in describing how the world would fall apart in a catastrophe and human animal instincts would take over without any remorse, how actually living like a blind feels like I can't ignore the fact that there was no description of why or how the epidemic got over which only means the author was lazying around and didn't want to expand on the difficult parts.
On a whole I rate this book 2/5 and would NOT recommend to anyone except my enemies perhaps. What a waste of time.
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u/Burgundy-Bag 1d ago
amateur reader
What is an amateur reader? Is it a reader who can take part in the reading Olympics?
the author cannot stop himself talking about excrements and young woman sleeping with different old men, makes me think that's probably what he wanted for himself.
So you think the author wants to be covered in excrements? I suppose the sex and the excrement has nothing to do with how the "human animal instinct" took over.
there was no description of why or how the epidemic got over which only means the author was lazying around and didn't want to expand on the difficult parts
How is that the difficult part? This is a work of fiction, not a scientific paper trying to pinpoint the cause of a real pandemic. The writer made up this whole world and could very easily make up the cause. Here is one: that was the natural course of that particular illness. Or there was a solar flare that caused the blindness. Or a dinosaur woke up from its 66 million-year sleep and said "BOO."
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u/ImJoshsome 22h ago
This is my favorite book by my favorite author. It might not have clicked with you, but to me Saramago has some of the best prose out there. I love his style and wish more authors used it.
With dialogue especially, I think Saramago writes dialogue that flows incredibly well and feels like real people.
If you’re unsatisfied with the unexplained, then you probably won’t like magical realism very much. It doesn’t really matter how or why the people went blind. Their blindness is used as a tool to examine the world and humanity.
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u/MagnusCthulhu 1d ago
I am sure your review of the deceased Nobel prize winning author Jose Saramago's most popular book will be truly devastating to him.
Normally, I don't like being dismissive of reviews but when the review says of the work of a Nobel prize winner that "the author was lazying around and didn't want to expand on the difficult parts"?
Well, you can usually be certain this is just user error.
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u/hasharn 1d ago
I mean god forbid someone has an opinion I guess
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u/Puzzleheaded-Catch15 1d ago
OP doesn’t understand the book, and their interpretation seems to come from a pretty serious misreading of it.
Saramago was “projecting” his own interests in feces and sex with older men in Blindness? There’s really nothing to support that. Those things appear in the novel, yes, but they exist within a much broader depiction of social collapse, degradation and what happens to human behaviour when the structures of society disappear. Context matters, right?
You can dislike the book, of course, but reducing those elements to Saramago “projecting” completely misses what he was doing with them.-4
u/hasharn 1d ago
I mean I agree but at the end of the day it’s a reader’s subjective view isn’t it?
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u/Puzzleheaded-Catch15 1d ago
It sure is, but your opinions can be wrong. You can’t just start making claims and mask them as opinions.
I can say something like, I don't like Blindness because there's just too much sex with old man and excrements, but to claim that "that's probably what he wanted for himself".
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u/todaysgamer 1d ago
Fair point, but in my 10 liner post I just mentioned about the point which I found to be most absurd, and I suggested if the author wanted young women for himself not the old men.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Catch15 20h ago edited 20h ago
I don’t know exactly what Saramago intended, but if you read history, you’ll know that, unfortunately, this is often how people behave in extreme situations.
Just look at Covid, people were panic-buying toilet paper over something that had nothing to do with the actual shortage. In more serious crises, you also see exploitation, violence and transactional sex, because there will always be people willing to take advantage of others.
Maybe Saramago was projecting something personal, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he simply believed this was a realistic way for society to behave once normal rules and structures broke down. We can speculate about his motives, but that doesn’t make those speculations facts.
He has given interviews about this book so you can actually know, in his own words, what he was thinking when he wrote it.
Here's one where he talks about it:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/22/jose-saramago-blindness-nobel
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u/TXtoOR 1d ago
The books is very dark and bleak and as such it’s not a happy read which is not the intention. What it is good for is a deep book club discussion on philosophical views as it dives into a lot of past philosophers ponderings on humanity. Certainly was not a pleasant read but, the point was to add onto existing philosophical thoughts and writings of past famous philosophers and their views written in the form of this novel
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u/[deleted] 1d ago
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