piercancellara

This was a very unusual book (that I wrote a review for once already and the interwebs ate it...grr...but I digress). The story is that a contagious blindness has begun affecting people and immediately the government decides to quarantine them. The conditions are horrific and I almost stopped reading once. It has overtones of Nazi Germany of course, but it's more than that. Eventually, everyone in the world goes blind. It's an amazing premise really, what would we do? how would we act? It's a thinky book. I'm not certain that the doom and gloom that Saramago spells out would occur--it's a bit of a leap for me that a book written in the 90s would have the government panicking so quickly and condemning people. Why don't they have hazmat suits? Still, if I consider that he wasn't writing about American society (and he likely wasn't, he's from Portugal), then I can buy it a bit easier. The other thing is his writing style. Which purposefully contains no names of the characters and...no traditional punctuation. The sentences run on in a stream of consciousness way. The quotes aren't marked at all. Supposedly he writes like this alot. If it's done for a linguistic/artistic effect, I can see how it would work. The book is VERY difficult to read in that it requires lots of concentration and it just takes you by the hand and jerks you along without letting you stop to get your breath. If it's done for other reasons (it's just easier to write without marking things and breaking paragraphs, etc.), then that's a problem. Still, I'm going to start another of Saramago's books then, so I must have liked something about it. ;)

2022-11-14 17:13