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 Until recently, Blindness was best known as the literary masterpiece that triggered Jose Saramago’s receipt of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Ten years later, the highly acclaimed work is back in the limelight with the release of a high profile film featuring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore. Having refused to sell the cinematic rights for nearly a decade, Saramago finally relented, and Fernando Meirelles’ movie is again sparking interest in this remarkable book about how society can collapse.
Blindness (entitled Ensaio sobre a Cegueira on the original Portuguese edition) centers on a random collection of characters in an unnamed city, thrown together as they succumb to a sudden and unfathomable plague of blindness. Forced into quarantine in a squalid asylum, Saramago details the stricken characters’ desperate fight for survival and the ensuing social and political breakdown. The sequel, Seeing, completes the saga, featuring some of the same characters.
Promoted to audiences as a dramatic thriller featuring an epidemic, riots, government conspiracy and end-of-the-world disaster, many movie viewers have been unprepared for Meirelles’s vivid portrayal of Saramago’s nightmare, which is at times shockingly violent and hopelessly bleak. Saramago, however, is no stranger to controversy - his portrayal of a fallible Jesus in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ resulted in his exclusion from the 1991 European Literary Prize competition and consequent emigration to the Canary Islands.
Described by Harold Bloom as “the most gifted novelist alive in the world today,” Saramago broke into international fame after winning the Portuguese PEN Club Award for Baltasar and Bilmunda in 1982, and has been renowned for his fantastical plots and striking scenarios ever since. Now 85 years old, this former car mechanic from Portugal remains known for his staunch communist beliefs and a timeless novel.
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