Blindness in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

May 28, 2007 Jessica Haider rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, favorites, dystopia, slipstream, 1000_books

Blindness is one of my all time favorite books. The premise of the story is that a mysterious "white blindness" spreads throughout the population. Saramago's writing style makes the readers feel a level of the disorientation that the novel's characters are going through. I highly recommend this gripping and profound story about the human condition! ...more

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May 25, 2011 Maryam rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

دنیای سیاهی که نمی خواهیم ببینیم اما دنیایی است که در آن زندگی می کنیم کم یا زیاد بنوعی هممون دچارش هستیم

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May 25, 2020 Sarah rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, fiction, euro-fiction, classics, portugal

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. CW: sexual assault; pandemic; death. This review references some of these events.

Listening to this during a pandemic was quite the experience. I would never have chosen to do so on my own, but it's for a book club, so I decided to go ahead with it despite my concerns. It was ok. There were times when I had to put it down for my own mental health, but mostly sudden white blindness and the specific events of the book were different enough from my COVID19 experience that they were not particularly CW: sexual assault; pandemic; death. This review references some of these events.

Listening to this during a pandemic was quite the experience. I would never have chosen to do so on my own, but it's for a book club, so I decided to go ahead with it despite my concerns. It was ok. There were times when I had to put it down for my own mental health, but mostly sudden white blindness and the specific events of the book were different enough from my COVID19 experience that they were not particularly triggery. The story follows a group of people suddenly stricken with white blindness, which soon becomes a pandemic that breaks down society. The group of main characters is sent to a quarantine site, where conditions devolve into the appalling, and then when they manage to get out (no spoilers), society has disintegrated in most ways and they have to fend for themselves, but they decide to do so as a group. I appreciated Saramago's main point - that the most beautiful world is created out of suffering - and appreciated the audiobook narration, which was good, something that I rarely say for fiction audiobooks. I did read that Saramago, whose other books I've not yet read, tended to use a lot of run-on sentences and not mark dialogue in this and some of his other books, which could make them hard to read, so listening might have actually been the better option for me (and many people) on this one, leaving the narrator to figure out how to interpret sentences and where to put pauses.

There is one major reason, however, I gave this book three rather than four stars. Somewhere in the middle, between hours four and five of the audio, there is a gang rape scene, involving numerous women, that last for almost the entire hour on audio. It is on-the-page, and was incredibly difficult for me to listen to, and I am not a survivor. I would urge extreme restraint for anyone who is or for whom this is otherwise a triggery topic. Maybe just skip that whole passage, which you could easily do and not miss much of the underlying idea. The whole scene gave me much pause, as I found myself wondering if I'd ever read a fiction book written by a woman that included such a long and detailed rape scene (and concluded I had not, though I'm sure maybe some exist? Maybe?). And for what? It was visceral, but I'm not sure I needed that additional scene, in such length and detail, to get the point. The conditions were already horrid, and even the reference to such a scene, taking place off-page, would have been bone-chilling. I'm not at all sure that it was necessary, and I came away irritated that I had listened to it - I'll never be able to unhear it. ...more

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