Blindness

I am in a poorly attended book club, largely made up of my Williams friends. (Harry Potter 7 drew a crowd as did The Game. Most of our books have been more serious and less attended - likely not a coincidence.)

Our most recent book was Blindness by Jose Saramago. The book is about a contagious epidemic of white blindness. Much of the novel occurs in an increasingly sordid quarantine. It is a distopia novel, and the reader descends into the filth with the characters.

Saramago apparently is both high culture and low: he is a Nobel laurate, but Blindness is about to be a major motion picture, coming to a theater near you! (The movie does have a "serious" cast - Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, etc.)

I was not consulted on either the Nobel or Hollywood rights decisions. The book is tough - minimal punctuation, few pronouns, no character names. I thought this was intended to disorient the reader in manner semi-analogous to blindness. (I was still frustrated, but at least this was thought provoking.) But no, it turns out that Saramago does this stuff in all his books - so it is not specifically form-function linked.

Additionally, I generally avoid books and movies that could be described as "searing." But I'd have to say, I prefer my "brutal realism" realistic. This was a brutal parable, which didn't sit quite right with me.

I am definitely in the reader minority - Amazon's 362 reader reviews average to 4 stars. So if you're in the mood to wallow in excrement and wading through run-on sentences, go for it!