Blindness
  • Published: 3 June 2013
  • ISBN: 9780099573586
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $26.00

Blindness

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Jun 2013
EBook
20 Sep 2013
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A chillingly powerful dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers

No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order.
Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers.

A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.
It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped.

This is not anarchy, this is blindness.
‘Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet’ Independent
  • Published: 3 June 2013
  • ISBN: 9780099573586
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $26.00
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About the author

Jose Saramago

José Saramago is one of the most important international writers of the last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922, he was in his sixties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Saramago died in June 2010.

Also by Jose Saramago

Cain
The Elephant's Journey
Small Memories
An Unexpected Light
The Silence of Water
The Lizard
Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
See all

Praise for Blindness

This is a shattering work by a literary master...a book of real stature

Boston Globe

He writes a prose of particularly luminous intensity, brilliantly rendered into English by his regular translator Giovanni Pontiero...Sweepingly ambitious

The Times

Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet.

Independent

A powerful fable

Scotsman

Saramago's exuberant imagination, capriciousness and clear-sightedness find full expression in this engaging work

Extraordinary...a tour de force of thought-experiment and feeling-experiment

Observer

Blistering, unrelenting, horrifying, yet still somehow luminously redemptive

White Review, *Books of the Year*