Jose Saramago Blindness Ebook Pdf
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(Blindness #1)
From Nobel Prize–winning author José Saramago, a magnificent, mesmerizing parable of loss
A city is hit by an epidemic of 'white blindness' that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her...more
A city is hit by an epidemic of 'white blindness' that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her...more
Published August 23rd 2013 by Mariner Books (first published 1995)
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- 13 likes · like
Virginia ArthurGOOD? Raw, gross, compelling, and disturbing. Incredible if not mysterious writing.
Al MakiFor one thing, it's actually realistic. Jorge Luis Borges was blind most of his life and he said the one color he never saw again after he became…moreFor one thing, it's actually realistic. Jorge Luis Borges was blind most of his life and he said the one color he never saw again after he became blind was black. He saw a numinous field that was usually blue. Another thing, if you take the book as a parable, which given the fact that the author was a life long communist seems reasonable, then the blindness could be a result of cultural brainwashing, i.e. the blocking of real information by overloading the eyes, as Bruce Springsteen put it 'blinded by the light.'(less)
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Rating details
Jun 18, 2007William rated it really liked it · review of another edition
When you sit in a coffee shop at the corner of two busy streets and read a book about blindness, you find yourself thinking unfamiliar thoughts, and you believe, when you raise your head to watch the people passing, that you see things differently. You notice the soft yellow light of the shop reflecting off the bronze of the hardwood floors. You notice among the people coming from the train two girls who intersect that line, spilt, call back, and go their ways, dividing into the two directions o...more
Sep 03, 2012Jeffrey Keeten rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
”The advantage enjoyed by these blind men was what might be called the illusion of light. In fact, it made no difference to them whether it was day or night, the first light of dawn or the evening twilight, the silent hours of early morning or the bustling din of noon, these blind people were for ever surrounded by a resplendent whiteness, like the sun shining through mist. For the latter, blindness did not mean being plunged into banal darkness, but living inside a luminous halo.”
We have all...more
Dec 31, 2011Nataliya rated it it was amazingWe have all...more
Jose Saramago Blindness Ebook Pdf Free
· review of another edition Shelves: 2012-reads, excellent-reads, favorites, awesome-kickass-heroines, dystopia-postapocalyptic
This book left me speechless (which is a rare occurrence). Please enjoy the pictures to illustrate the plot while I recover my gift of rambling.
An unexplained plague of 'white blindness' sweeps the unnamed country. Initial attempts to hastily quarantine the blind in an abandoned mental hospital fail to contain the spread. What they succeed at is immediately creating the easy 'us versus them' divide between the helpless newly blind and the terrified seeing. Before we know, we are immersed in th...more
An unexplained plague of 'white blindness' sweeps the unnamed country. Initial attempts to hastily quarantine the blind in an abandoned mental hospital fail to contain the spread. What they succeed at is immediately creating the easy 'us versus them' divide between the helpless newly blind and the terrified seeing. Before we know, we are immersed in th...more
May 19, 2013Emily May rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Just imagine that you are going about your daily life as you always do. It's a normal day; nothing out of the ordinary. But then, suddenly, without any forewarning, you go completely blind. One second seeing the world as you know it, the next experiencing a complete and unending whiteness.
Then imagine you go to the trusty health professionals so they can get to the bottom of it... the doctor doesn't know what's wrong with you, but you're confident he/she will figure it out and prescribe accordi...more
Oct 01, 2014Adina rated it it was amazing · review of another editionThen imagine you go to the trusty health professionals so they can get to the bottom of it... the doctor doesn't know what's wrong with you, but you're confident he/she will figure it out and prescribe accordi...more
Shelves: portugal, w-mwl-alternative, dystopia, favorites
I finished this masterpiece last week and I let it to sink in a little bit before reviewing it. The power of this book was quite overwhelming at times and I had to stop reading for a few days at a time. I do not think there are many books that disturbed me like this one. Maybe Never Let Me Go but there the message was much more subtle.
Some say that the structure of the book makes it very hard to read. I suppose the voice in my head did quite a good job in reading it as I did not encounter any d...more
Mar 08, 2014Renato Magalhães Rocha rated it it was amazing · review of another editionSome say that the structure of the book makes it very hard to read. I suppose the voice in my head did quite a good job in reading it as I did not encounter any d...more
Shelves: 100-best-books-world-library, indicacoes-fred, reviewed, kindle-ebooks, all-stars, saramago, 2014, absolute-favorites
Blindness is a great novel by Portuguese writer José Saramago that deals with human's individual and collective reactions when in the face of adversarial forces. With gorgeous prose, this thought-provoking book shows us how our world, ever so concerned and consumed by appearances, would deal with the loss of our most relied upon sense: vision. When it's every man by himself, when every man is free to do whatever he wants without the impending fear of recognition and judgement, we start to feel -...more
Jun 24, 2014Lisa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition Shelves: nobels, so-good-it-hurts, favorites, unforgettable
Imagine the most ordinary situation in the world.
People waiting at a traffic light. All of us can see that before our inner eyes, relive thousands of similar situations we have experienced ourselves, without ever giving them a moment of consideration. Thus starts Saramago's Blindness. But there is a disruption. One car is not following the rules all take for granted. The car doesn't move when the light switches to green. People are annoyed, frustrated, disturbed in their routines, but not worr...more
People waiting at a traffic light. All of us can see that before our inner eyes, relive thousands of similar situations we have experienced ourselves, without ever giving them a moment of consideration. Thus starts Saramago's Blindness. But there is a disruption. One car is not following the rules all take for granted. The car doesn't move when the light switches to green. People are annoyed, frustrated, disturbed in their routines, but not worr...more
Sep 10, 2012P-eggy rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Update. I said I would never read another Saramago because of his writing style. I did though. All the Names and Death with Interruptions. Both brilliant. But I listened to them. I wouldn't have appreciated them as much if I'd had to struggle through Saramago's idiosyncratic writing style.
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In H.G. Wells 'In the Country of the Blind' the only person who can see suffers great discrimination and has to agree to have his eyes removed and become as blind as the rest of the people who...more
Dec 21, 2015Lizzy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition_________________
In H.G. Wells 'In the Country of the Blind' the only person who can see suffers great discrimination and has to agree to have his eyes removed and become as blind as the rest of the people who...more
Shelves: read-years-ago, stars-5, classics-literay-fiction
“I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”José Saramago’s Blindness can be viewed as an allegory for a world where we see but in fact neglect what is around us. It is a human condition, unquestionable a disease that in contemporary time has only agravated.
'..blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone.'Blindness is more than a dystopian novel, it is a philosophical work that makes us wonder about our...more
Mar 28, 2008Brad rated it did not like it · review of another edition
Not at all disturbing, not at all compelling and not at all interesting, Jose Saramago's Blindness only succeeds in frustrating readers who take a moment to let their imagination beyond the page. Yes, Saramago's story is a clever idea, and, yes, he creates an intentional allegory to force us to think about the nature of humanity, but his ideas are clearly those of a privileged white male in a privileged European nation. Not only do his portrayals of women and their men fall short of the mark, bu...more
Mar 30, 2015Seemita rated it it was amazing · review of another edition Shelves: nobel-laureates, portugal, translated, fiction, horror, psychology, drama, for_legacy, favorites, sharp_sword
Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.
What an irony that a book which holds, loss, filth, loot, stomp, cruelty, disorientation, putrefaction, injustice, helplessness, murder, rape, misery, nakedness, abandonment, death and unimaginable suffering in its bosom, left me with a climactic emotion of beauty, overwhelming beauty. Beauty of what you ask? That of resilience, that of courage, that of insurmountable human spirit which perhaps hits its zenith when it is brutally pinned to the bottommost...more
What an irony that a book which holds, loss, filth, loot, stomp, cruelty, disorientation, putrefaction, injustice, helplessness, murder, rape, misery, nakedness, abandonment, death and unimaginable suffering in its bosom, left me with a climactic emotion of beauty, overwhelming beauty. Beauty of what you ask? That of resilience, that of courage, that of insurmountable human spirit which perhaps hits its zenith when it is brutally pinned to the bottommost...more
May 09, 2010Megha rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Whether you interpret it as an allegory or otherwise, you will find that most of all Blindness is about being human, and the virtues and vices that define the fundamental human nature.
In a world full of blind people, where the civilization as we know it has completely deteriorated, people are no more identified and judged based on their profession, social status, outward appearances etc. All that remains to distinguish one person from another is one's voice, and the kind of person one is. When...more
Oct 30, 2016Maxwell rated it really liked it · review of another edition
This book was brutal in the most literal sense of the term. It looks at how humans can devolve into savages when put in certain situations, in this case when a 'white blindness' epidemic breaks out and causes people to suddenly lose their sight for no explicable reason.
Saramago is a pretty harsh critic, it seems, of organized structures like government or religion—and that's most clearly seen in the ways that the affected people create communities, how they respond to crises, and ultimately how...more
Saramago is a pretty harsh critic, it seems, of organized structures like government or religion—and that's most clearly seen in the ways that the affected people create communities, how they respond to crises, and ultimately how...more
Dec 30, 2014Jibran rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.
Goodness me. The horror. The chaos. These two moist pulpy vibratile objects of anatomy, one on either side of the nose, 'the window to the soul', are steering wheels of the body, the basis of all order in the fragile human world, without which the purpose of evolutionary biology is moot. What would it be like if everyone was struck by an epidemic of blindness, sudden and inexplicable, you and I 'catching' blindness from one...more
Goodness me. The horror. The chaos. These two moist pulpy vibratile objects of anatomy, one on either side of the nose, 'the window to the soul', are steering wheels of the body, the basis of all order in the fragile human world, without which the purpose of evolutionary biology is moot. What would it be like if everyone was struck by an epidemic of blindness, sudden and inexplicable, you and I 'catching' blindness from one...more
Apr 07, 2017Stephan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
This is not just a book you read, it reads you too. It is not a book that you can shelve, once it is read - it stays with you. Will you dare pick it up, let it stare into your soul?
I read this over 10 years ago and it is still very present in my mind. It has repeatedly come back to me, I have been recommending it and thinking about it. Yes, also worrying a bit more.
Without spoiling it the story is quickly told: blindness spreads like a disease. It is terrifying in that it just happens, suddenly...more
I read this over 10 years ago and it is still very present in my mind. It has repeatedly come back to me, I have been recommending it and thinking about it. Yes, also worrying a bit more.
Without spoiling it the story is quickly told: blindness spreads like a disease. It is terrifying in that it just happens, suddenly...more
Sep 25, 2007Paul Bryant rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
What kind of a person is it who relishes reviewing the books he hates and quails at the thought of reviewing his five-star books?
It would appear that that could be a description of me. Well, the reason's obvious - it's great fun to boot a bad book and some bad ideas all around this site, a chance for a few jokes, a laugh, a song and a hand grenade, a couple of pints of Scruttock's Old Dirigible and everyone goes home with a smile on their face, no harm done. Not so easy to describe greatness, s...more
It would appear that that could be a description of me. Well, the reason's obvious - it's great fun to boot a bad book and some bad ideas all around this site, a chance for a few jokes, a laugh, a song and a hand grenade, a couple of pints of Scruttock's Old Dirigible and everyone goes home with a smile on their face, no harm done. Not so easy to describe greatness, s...more
May 29, 2007Sammy rated it really liked it · review of another edition
This is definitely a book that people will either love or hate. It's just that kind of book. Not everyone is going to pick this up and like it. Even the people who end up really liking it, while reading it keep finding themselves putting down the book, looking around the room and sighing in discomfort, wondering if they should really continue. They will though, and they will once again find themselves fully immersed.
Jose Saramago writes this specific story in such a way that you are one of the b...more
Jose Saramago writes this specific story in such a way that you are one of the b...more
Jul 21, 2017Bradley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
I can *almost* slip this book into that enormous category that is zombie-fiction, but alas, no. There are no zombies here.
There are, however, an increasingly large number of people going blind until there is only one left.
Chaos ensues... one heartbreaking step at a time.
Simple concept, of course, but in this case, it is brilliantly executed. The writing is clear and transforms us every step of the way from our modern society into a cold cinder of civilization, with the fall of humanity experienc...more
There are, however, an increasingly large number of people going blind until there is only one left.
Chaos ensues... one heartbreaking step at a time.
Simple concept, of course, but in this case, it is brilliantly executed. The writing is clear and transforms us every step of the way from our modern society into a cold cinder of civilization, with the fall of humanity experienc...more
Dec 27, 2010Adam Floridia rated it did not like it · review of another edition
It is easier for me to lambaste a book when it is a translation; after all, maybe it is not the author who should be held accountable for the text’s flaws. Whether or not the translator is culpable, Blindness indeed has many flaws.
First: In order, one must assume, to make the reader’s experience as tantamount to the characters’ as possible, there are no names and no quotation marks to indicate speech. That’s fine enough, but he chooses not to use periods either, that makes almost every sentence,...more
First: In order, one must assume, to make the reader’s experience as tantamount to the characters’ as possible, there are no names and no quotation marks to indicate speech. That’s fine enough, but he chooses not to use periods either, that makes almost every sentence,...more
Aug 14, 2019Steven Godin rated it really liked it · review of another edition
I was lent this book back in the late 90's, when I wasn't really an avid reader, barely scraping through five to ten books a year, and I soon quit, because of the annoyance of page after page of run-on sentences, un-paragraphed dialogue and zero quotation marks, What the hell! I thought, I'd never come across this before. I can't be doing with this. Here, have your book back.
Two decades later, and after thoroughly enjoying both 'The Double' and 'All the Names' in the last year or so, I got my ha...more
Two decades later, and after thoroughly enjoying both 'The Double' and 'All the Names' in the last year or so, I got my ha...more
Mar 15, 2007spencer rated it it was ok · review of another edition
Nov 14, 2017Ram Alsrougi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shocking and enormous the universe of the Portuguese writer - the bright universe you are called to live through a fantastic story that is horribly unlikely to real.
This famous book begins with a pandemic of blindness somewhere-anywhere, which is unexplained and extremely unprecedented, rather transmitted, so that in a few days the society of suddenly and abruptly blind and helpless people is created.
This society is quarantined by prominent governmental actors and the rule of law that is still n...more
This famous book begins with a pandemic of blindness somewhere-anywhere, which is unexplained and extremely unprecedented, rather transmitted, so that in a few days the society of suddenly and abruptly blind and helpless people is created.
This society is quarantined by prominent governmental actors and the rule of law that is still n...more
Apr 15, 2011Paquita Maria Sanchez rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Whoa! This will be a bit scatterbrained. Maybe I will come back later and try to really give this the long, well-thought-out review that it deserves, but right now I am too busy basking in a mix of discomfort and disorientation.
Somewhat important fact concerning this book and my review and rating of it: I saw this movie first, and felt that it (to be totally clear) fucking sucked*, but was fascinated by the plot enough to randomly pick up this novel one day when I so happened to pass a faced-ou...more
Feb 18, 2016Gautam rated it it was amazing · review of another editionSomewhat important fact concerning this book and my review and rating of it: I saw this movie first, and felt that it (to be totally clear) fucking sucked*, but was fascinated by the plot enough to randomly pick up this novel one day when I so happened to pass a faced-ou...more
Shelves: nobel-winners, haunting, favorites, portugese-lit
I had been idle on goodreads for several months due to a form of torpor arising from being workaholic. I had been toiling hard at my work to impress my superior and, concomitantly, get a hike or promotion (God knows why! No matter how much I get persistent in shunning the beaten track of life, I again get sucked back to it as if the common-place life is a giant blackhole, always ready to engulf back those who go astray from it). One day, 18th feb 2016, I started reading Blindness by Jose` Sarama...more
Apr 06, 2019Meike rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Saramago's Nobel prize is well-deserved: His writing is edgy and inventive, and while this is certainly no feel-good-lit, it is absorbing and fascinating. 'Blindess' is a daring novel about human nature that avoids clichés and doesn't shy away from drastic descriptions. The story is more of a thought experiment: In an unnamed city, people suddenly start to go blind. The condition is spreading like an epidemic, and in an attempt to contain the disease, the blind are locked into a former mental ho...more
May 04, 2019Johann (jobis89) rated it really liked it · review of another edition
“Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.”
An unexplained mass epidemic of blindness spreads throughout a city, afflicting almost everyone, as civilisation begins to fall apart.
First things first, this book has an incredible premise and story but you gotta be prepared to put in a little elbow grease to get it! Unless, of course, you are used to reading walls of text with no speech marks and long-ass sentences that go on for half a page...
That is honestly my only re...more
An unexplained mass epidemic of blindness spreads throughout a city, afflicting almost everyone, as civilisation begins to fall apart.
First things first, this book has an incredible premise and story but you gotta be prepared to put in a little elbow grease to get it! Unless, of course, you are used to reading walls of text with no speech marks and long-ass sentences that go on for half a page...
That is honestly my only re...more
May 09, 2017Χαρά Ζ. rated it really liked it · review of another edition
_Blindness_
In the first half of this book i was constantly thinking 'We are fucking animals'. I found everything that was going on to be disturbing and disgusting. You know that feeling, the one that you feel like you want to vomit a little bit. The thing that frightened me the most was that i got used to it while the book was progressing. I didn't mind anymore.
It is pretty clear. If we ever get to be in this situation that's how things will go. Or even worse.
In the second half we get to relax...more
Aug 13, 2015Rakhi Dalal rated it really liked it · review of another editionIn the first half of this book i was constantly thinking 'We are fucking animals'. I found everything that was going on to be disturbing and disgusting. You know that feeling, the one that you feel like you want to vomit a little bit. The thing that frightened me the most was that i got used to it while the book was progressing. I didn't mind anymore.
It is pretty clear. If we ever get to be in this situation that's how things will go. Or even worse.
In the second half we get to relax...more
Shelves: compelling, powerful-stuff, nobel-prized-author, haunting
I read somewhere that this work of Saramogo, when published, was compared to Camus’ The Plague by many critics. Perhaps it is owing to the portrayal of a city facing an endemic in both works. On this account, the comparison is permissible. However, in my view, both works stand apart from each other. The reason primarily being that whereas The Plague, through an endemic, successfully brings forth the idea of solidarity among humans for a survival in an otherwise absurd world, Blindness on the oth...more
Apr 23, 2007Amos rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Blindness Jose Saramago Summary
Saramago is an incredible writer and I think Blindness is, hands down, his best novel.
There are no names in the book (the narrator identifies everybody by their traits) which makes the characters universal. In typical Saramago style, there are very few paragraph indents and very few periods, but a great number of commas. Also, as Saramago readers have come to expect, the language is deceptively simple yet loaded with meaning. Saramago conveys in half a dozen words what another writer would take...more
There are no names in the book (the narrator identifies everybody by their traits) which makes the characters universal. In typical Saramago style, there are very few paragraph indents and very few periods, but a great number of commas. Also, as Saramago readers have come to expect, the language is deceptively simple yet loaded with meaning. Saramago conveys in half a dozen words what another writer would take...more
Sep 03, 2014Algernon (Darth Anyan) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
I’ve read more than my share of post-apocalyptic novels where humanity is suddenly wiped out by a sudden plague or enslaved by aliens, attacked by zombies, buried under snow or under volcanic ash. I have even read one about people going blind overnight in The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. Yet, none of them managed to touch me so deeply and to disturb me out of my comfortably numb daily routine as Jose Saramago’s account. There are no teenage chosen ones to pull us back from the brink of e...more
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| Return of the Rog...:Blindness by Jose Saramago | 13 | 6 | Aug 18, 2019 08:16AM |
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| Book Review - Blindness by Jose Saramago | 1 | 4 | Apr 22, 2019 03:52PM |
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José de Sousa Saramago (pronounced [ʒuˈzɛ sɐɾɐˈmagu]) was a Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, playwright, and journalist. He was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party.
His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor rather than the officially sanctioned story. Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize f...more
His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor rather than the officially sanctioned story. Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize f...more
Blindness(2 books)
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“If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?” — 2134 likes
“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.” — 1536 likes
More quotes…| Category:Fiction The author of the book:Jose Saramago Format files: PDF, EPUB, TXT, DOCX The size of the: 690 KB Language: English ISBN-13: 9780156007757 Edition: HARVEST BOOKS Date of issue: 4 October 1999 |
Description of the book 'Blindness':
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 PDF 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.Reviews of the Blindness
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