Note: Please join Jami Attenberg at Powell's City of Books on Wednesday, June 26, for an in-store reception at 6:30 p.m. followed by a reading at...
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nsm2792, January 19, 2012 (view all comments by nsm2792)
It is a good book because it opens your mind through ideas and make you think about them.This book learns you to look positive to everything so your life become better.It's true that we are not living in a paradise but understanding that why some people or you are doing something wrong will make your world like paradise. With this book I understand that our looking and our judgments make our world worse and worse consequently we can make it better ourselves by looking good,thinking good and judging good.
ladymacbech, January 9, 2012 (view all comments by ladymacbech)
"Blindness," by Jose Saramago, can cross cultures, and was an amazing "personal" experience. A most different concept with printed material. I found this book hard (emotionally) to read, but harder (mentally and physically) to put down. I read it back-to-back twice. It wasn't difficult to not imagine all the characters "alive" and identify with the experiences of blindness and a society-out-of-balance. I suppose this could possibly happen physically, but it certainly does in the mind, and in alternate realities in society at large. There's no need to close ones eyes, just look around. This was an amazing "read."
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krken2000, January 4, 2011 (view all comments by krken2000)
I loved this book as it was a page turner, quick read. Written by a Nobel Prize winner, Blindness focuses on the vulnerability of man in a time of crisis. Would chaos rule if an epidemic of blindness were to happen? Yes according to Saramago. I tend to think we would help rather than harm each other. Regardless, I was spellbound by the intense action and unique characters that had to bond rather quickly in order to survive this harrowing nightmarish existence. I recommend. It is also available on DVD as a motion picture released in 2008. kk
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Catherine Malcolm, July 14, 2009 (view all comments by Catherine Malcolm)
Haunting...I hope to read this allegory again. Shattering morality tale format.This story reminded me of Lord of the Flies,but takes place in the present.A pandemic of contagious white blindness leads the first people to be identified to be quarantined in a filthy, abandoned insane asylum seemingly forever.As the holding tank fills,the more insane and hellishly degrading the situation becomes.Not for the feint of heart!
The story descends into barbarism, violence (including from the military caretakers),paranoia, and starvation. The initial 7 internees (the 7th is a seer) make a ramshackle escape to reveal a new set of challenges and hopes.
Not to be missed! Fascinating.
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"Review"
by Library Journal,
"Beautifully written in a concise, haunting prose...this unsettling, highly original work is essential reading."
"Review"
by David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars,
"Saramago's Blindness is the best novel I've read since Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera. It is a novel of enormous skill and authority....Like all great books it is simultaneously contemporary and timeless, and ambitiously confronts the human condition without a false note struck anywhere. Saramago is one of the great writers of our time, and Blindness, ironically is the product of his extraordinary vision."
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews, starred review,
"Blindness may be as revolutionary in its own way and time as were, say, The Trial and The Plague were in theirs. Another masterpiece."
"Review"
by Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon,
"Saramago writes phantasmagoria — in the midst of the most astonishing fantasy he has a meticulous sense of detail. It's very eloquent stuff."
"Review"
by The Washington Post,
"It is the voice of Blindness that gives it its charm. By turns ironic, humorous and frank, there is a kind of wink of humor between author and reader that is perfectly imbued with fury at the excesses of the current century. Blindness reminds me of Kafka roaring with laughter as he read his stories to his friends....Blindness' impact carries the force of an author whose sensibility is significant."
"Review"
by The Boston Globe,
"Blindness is a shattering work by a literary master."
"Review"
by Salon,
"More frightening than Stephen King, as unrelenting as a bad dream, José Saramago's 'Blindness' politely rubs our faces in apocalypse....A metaphor like 'white blindness' might easily seem forced or labored, but Saramago makes it live by focusing on the stubbornly literal; his account of a clump of newly blind people trying to find their way to food or to the bathroom provides some surprisingly gripping passages. While this epidemic has a clear symbolic burden, it's also a real and very inconvenient affliction."
"Synopsis"
by Firebrand,
In Blindness, a city is overcome by an epidemic of blindness that spares only one woman. She becomes a guide for a group of seven strangers and serves as the eyes and ears for the reader in this profound parable of loss and disorientation. We return to the city years later in Saramagos Seeing, a satirical commentary on government in general and democracy in particular. Together here for the first time, this beautiful edition will be a welcome addition to the library of any Saramago fan.
"Synopsis"
by Firebrand,
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.
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