Blindness - José Saramago

I think I am probably the persone who hates this book the most in the whole world! But first things first, you should know that I could be considered as a negative reader since I read a lot of books but only like a few.

I had never read anything by the author before and my review is not intended towards him in anyway. I just need to say what I think about this book.

 

The first thought on my mind while reading the book was: What a disappointment! They give Nobel prizes for such THINGS now? Life is so unfair! The Curie(s) got themselves killed, Marshall went through terrible agony and many others wasted their lives and health for this award and this lame story is to be considered equally important? Over my dead body!!! And I do mean it!

If this were a movie I would have flipped the channel immediately. How many times so far have this idea been exploited? It is boring; it has been boring since forever. I have to admit though, the white blindness, so creative! (Wish you could hear the sarcasm). I mean seriously, what was he thinking? What was the purpose behind this color? To make the blindness original? Is this what these numerous pages were trying to convey? Why not choose a purple blindness? An orange one? Or pistachio? The color had no connection whatsoever to the story. I feel it was UFOed in the book somehow.

Some other things I found even more creative (NOT) were: the guy with the infection (Typical Hollywood turn of event), the slut (yeah let’s add some spice to this dull life) the fight for food, the domination of the bad guys over the good ones blablabla, it happens every day around us (JUST OPEN YOUR EYES). Maybe some people feel touched when they read about these things in novels but I don’t. I don’t like when we try to mix the real world in the world of novels. It becomes either boring or unethical or at least this is how I feel about it.

Now I would have been half as disappointed as I am now if the story ended with the 7 or so persons but NOOOOOOOOO, the story wasn’t boring enough with 7 or so characters, someone had to shove in 200 more! The more the merrier maybe but all I saw was a fight for food with a greater number of people! Or were the gang and gang leader and their terms that important to convey us the message that man is an animal? We got this message from the first few pages and honestly It is something I realized a long time ago and we can see it every day around us too if we only OPEN OUR EYES (see what I did there? :D). I hate when people try to lead us by the hand to see what they think they’re the only ones to see it. Or as they call it, give us a moral. The only moral in life is that there are no morals!

Finally about the style, to write a book with no punctuation is as absurd to me as eating fries without ketchup. But honestly this wasn’t much of a bother. Everyone’s got its tastes. On the opposite, I did like, I even loved the fact that he didn’t use character names not because it was original but because he explains it in the text in his passage about the dogs not needing names to communicate with each other and live together and that this was the most convenient thing to do for the characters of this book.
See you next book J