Körlük (Blindness)

Heavy content and plot. The book has detailed scenes of violence and sexual violence. Below I also tell the plot and the ending.

A man goes blind in his car while waiting at a traffic light. Then the man who helps him goes blind. Then the eye doctor, then the patients in the waiting room.

The epidemic spreads like this. The state shuts the blind into an empty asylum and puts soldiers at the door: anyone who approaches will be shot.

Nobody has a name

Not one proper name appears in the book.

The characters are referred to like this: the first blind man, the first blind man's wife, the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with dark glasses, the old man with the black eye patch, the boy with the squint.

At first I took this for a game. Then I realized: in blindness nobody sees anybody's face, so identity does not remain either. People recognize each other by voice and function.

Namelessness is not a stylistic choice but a requirement of the subject.

The book changed when I noticed

The blindness is white.

Not darkness. People remain inside a milky brightness, as if milk had been poured into their eyes.

When I noticed this detail, what was being told changed for me. There is no darkness to hide in. Everything happens in the light. And nobody sees.

Through the whole book it plays on the difference between not seeing and not looking.

The quarantine chapters

Heavy. Saramago does not soften, does not turn the camera away, does not cut the scene.

The wards fill up, the toilets clog, food arrives irregularly. People begin to live in their own filth and this is told for pages.

Then a group arms itself. First they demand valuables in exchange for food. When the valuables run out they demand women.

That section was one of the hardest pages I have read. Several times I closed the book.

I write this as a warning, not to disparage the book. That Saramago wrote it this openly is a choice and it has a reason: a softened version would have been a lie.

The doctor's wife

She carries the whole weight of the book.

The only person who is not blind. To be confined with her husband she pretends to be blind and goes in.

She does not say she can see. Because if she says it, everything will be expected of her.

Then everything is expected of her anyway. She distributes the food, she does the cleaning, she finds the ways, she buries the dead. And in the end she does the killing too: the leader of the ward, with a pair of scissors.

Being the only one who sees turns into not a privilege but a duty. Nobody thanks her. Nobody shares the load. And she cannot say "I am tired" to anyone, because the others' state is worse.

Anyone who knows what it is to be the first person to notice what is missing in a home or a relationship recognizes this character. Noticing turns into being responsible.

After going outside

The quarantine burns down, they come out and see that the whole city is blind.

This chapter is, I think, the best place in the book. Shops looted, corpses in the street, dogs eating the dead. People look for food and eat whatever they get their hands on.

The small group gathers at the doctor's wife's home. They wash. They eat. And they begin to behave like human beings again.

Punctuation

In the first thirty pages it wore me out. No marks except periods and commas. Dialogues without quotation marks, no line breaks, unclear who is speaking.

Then I got used to it. After I got used to it something happened: I could not quite tell who was speaking, and this resembled the state the book describes. There are voices, no faces.

That the form is part of the subject moved me. The difficulty was not ornament.

What remains at the end

The blindness goes as it came: suddenly. The first blind man is the first to see.

The doctor's wife looks up and the book's last sentence ends with a question: had we really gone blind, or were we blind people who see?

This sentence felt to me a bit too explicit — the book had already shown it, it did not need to say it. This is my only objection.

About its author

Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. This book was published in 1995.

Around four hundred pages, and the first hundred pages are fast; the quarantine section in the middle is the heaviest part.

Do not open it on a bad day. I did, and could not collect myself for several days.