She secretly and subtly tries to help the others around her without giving her secret away. An eye doctor’s wife – rather than leave her husband, who, as the doctor who examined the first man to go blind and was himself one of the first group to catch the disease, she pretends to be blind. I can honestly say it makes you feel dirty.īut there is just one person in the asylum who can see. When an armed gang of blind men take over the food distribution demanding first valuables and then women in payment, you are truly horrified where before you were revolted by the conditions. The army don’t deliver enough food and everyone gets very hungry. This situation rapidly changes from quarantine into imprisonment and squalor as the blind fumble about – they befoul the corridors as they can’t find the toilets, people get injured and die from infection. When an epidemic of sudden blindness happens, the blind and those contaminated by them are quarantined in an old asylum where they are left to fend for themselves. He wrote this novel in 1995 and what a book it is! This was our book group choice for December, and we all found it an intense and compelling read. 1997 Nobel laureate Saramago was born in 1922 and is considered to be Portugal’s top living writer.
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