Blindness by jose saramago free ebook

Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Blindness Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Collection inlibrary ; printdisabled ; internetarchivebooks ; delawarecountydistrictlibrary ; china ; americana Digitizing sponsor Internet Archive Contributor Internet Archive Language English.

He is taken to an eye doctor, who does not know what to make of the phenomenon - and soon goes blind himself. Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards under instructions to shoot anyone trying to escape. He is gunned down while trying to ask the guards for medication for his infected leg. The first man to go blind is struck blind in the middle of traffic, waiting at a stoplight. He is immediately taken home and then to the doctor's office, where he infects all of the other patients.

He is one of the principal members of the first ward - the ward with all of the original internees. He is also the first to regain his sight, when the epidemic is finally over. The wife of the first blind man goes blind soon after helping her husband to the quarantine. They are reunited by pure chance in the quarantine. Once inside, she also joins the first ward with the doctor and the doctor's wife.

When the ward of hoodlums begins to demand that the women sleep with them in order to be fed, the first blind man's wife volunteers to go, in solidarity with the others. The man with the gun is the leader of the ward of hoodlums that seizes control of the food supply in the quarantine. He and his ward take the rations by force and threaten to shoot anyone who doesn't comply.

This ward extorts valuables from the other internees in exchange for food and, when the bracelets and watches run out, they begin to rape the women. He is later stabbed to death by the doctor's wife. This man is not one of those afflicted by the 'white sickness'—rather he has been blind since birth.

He is the only one in the ward who can read and write braille and who knows how to use a walking stick. Additionally, he is the second in command to the man with the gun in the ward of hoodlums. When the doctor's wife kills the man with the gun, the blind accountant takes the gun and tries to seize control but he is unable to rally support. He dies when one of the rape victims sets fire to the ward.

Like most works by Saramago, the novel contains many long, breathless sentences in which commas take the place of periods, quotation marks, semicolons and colons. The lack of quotation marks around dialogue means that the speakers' identities or the fact that dialogue is occurring may not be immediately apparent to the reader.

The lack of proper character names in Blindness is typical of many of Saramago's novels e. All the Names. The characters are instead referred to by descriptive appellations such as 'the doctor's wife', 'the car thief', or 'the first blind man'. Given the characters' blindness, some of these names seem ironic 'the boy with the squint' or 'the girl with the dark glasses'. The city afflicted by the blindness is never named, nor the country specified.

Few definite identifiers of culture are given, which contributes an element of timelessness and universality to the novel. The church, with all its saintly images, is likely of the Catholic variety. Saramago wrote a sequel to Blindness in , titled Seeing Ensaio sobre a lucidez , literal English translation Essay on lucidity , which has also been translated into English.

The new novel takes place in the same country featured in Blindness and features several of the same characters. An English-language film adaptation of Blindness was directed by Fernando Meirelles. Filming began in July and stars Mark Ruffalo as the doctor and Julianne Moore as the doctor's wife. The film opened the Cannes Film Festival. This stage version was adapted and directed by Joe Tantalo. It has since been performed at a number of venues, including the Old College Quad of the University of Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Shortly before his death, Saramago gave German composer Anno Schreier the rights to compose an opera based on the novel. Like the German translation of the novel, the opera's title is 'Die Stadt der Blinden'. It saw its first performance on November 12, at the Zurich Opera House. Faced with pages of run-on sentences and unparagraphed dialogue without quotation marks, I soon quit, snarling about literary affectations.

Later I tried again, went further, and quit because I was scared. Blindness is a frightening book. Before I'd let an author of such evident power give me the horrors, he'd have to earn my trust. So I went back to the earlier novels and put myself through a course of Saramago. Everyone likes to read these books. But not all the books are this much famous and interesting books. Some of them are average and some of them are just the ordinary books. But the book we are talking about i.

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