In this strange novel, translated from the original Portuguese, a car driver in an unspecified city in an unspecified country, in an unspecified year, suddenly goes blind while waiting at a stop light. A stranger drives him to his home, then steals his car and then also goes blind. In short order, everyone of their contacts also go blind, leading to a rapidly expanding colony of quarantined blind folk in an an abandoned mental institution- with one unexplained exception. Starvation, treachery, thievery, rape, killings and filth ensue as everyone in the whole city goes blind except for the one devious woman. In the last four pages, the characters progressively, one after another, suddenly regain vision.
This is supposedly a surreal allegory and a vivid bitter parable, but to me it comes across as a weak excuse to depict the worst traits of human beings under unimaginable stresses. The description of starving people covered in excrement, looting, robbing, raping, and killing each other serves no useful literary purpose as far as I can tell.
Without intimate knowledge of rules of Portuguese grammar and punctuation, I cannot determine whether the author or the translated is more to blame for breaking all the elementary rules of English grammar and punctuation. There are three page paragraphs with dialogue from multiple characters without quotation marks, run-on sentences that make up a full page, strings of short clauses in place of sentences, and questions with no question marks. Apparently breaking the rules of grammar was something the author was proud of and reviewers rewarded it with a Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. But I found it just annoying.
Only understood if at all, perhaps from the perspective of the author who was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party, is the following description of speeches of a group of the blind:…. “extolling the virtues of the fundamental principles of the great organized systems, private property, a free currency market, the market economy, the stock exchange, taxation, interest, expropriation and appropriation, production, distribution, consumption, supply and demand, poverty and wealth, communication, repression and delinquency, lotteries, prisons, the penal code, the civil code, the Highway Code, the telephone directory, networks of prostitution, armaments factories, the armed forces, cemeteries, the police, smuggling, drugs, permitted illegal traffic, pharmaceutical research, gambling, the price of priests and funerals, justice, borrowing, political parties, elections, parliaments, governments, convex, concave, horizontal, vertical, slanted, concentrated, diffuse, fleeting thoughts, the fraying of the vocal cords, the death of the word.” (My autocorrect refuses to let me write the Highway Code without the capitals!)
Thanks, Andra, but this one is going to the William’s Court lending library. Obviously many people appreciated it, but I was not one of them.
The Passionate Reader 