Essay on Blindness

2022: SARAMAGO YEAR

A novel and an author who warn us about "the responsibility of having eyes when others have lost them."

"Inside us there is something that has no name; that thing is what we are."

A man standing at a red light suddenly goes blind. It is the first case of a "white blindness" that spreads rapidly. Interned in quarantine or lost in the city, the blind will have to confront the most primitive aspect of human nature: the will to survive at any cost.

Blindness is the fiction of an author who warns us about "the responsibility of having eyes when others have lost them." José Saramago draws in this book a terrifying and moving image of the times we are living in. In such a world, will there be any hope?

Readers will experience a unique imaginative journey. At a point where literature and wisdom intersect, José Saramago forces us to stop, close our eyes, and see. Recovering lucidity and rescuing affection are two fundamental proposals of a novel that is also a reflection on the ethics of love and solidarity.

Critics have said:
"A metaphor that, when published, could equally apply to AIDS or to the abandonment of the elderly. In this novel, blindness arrives without warning and produces a permanent white dazzling effect. Again, the best and worst of the species parade by. As in wars."
Tereixa Constenla, El País

"Saramago has always shown a bold imagination as a novelist. This is his most surprising and disturbing work."
Harold Bloom

"There is no cynicism or moralizing, only a lucid and compassionate recognition of things as they are, a quality that can only be honestly described as wisdom."
The New York Times

"There are novels, like this one, that after being read will continue to illuminate tunnels in consciousness, opening doors to rooms we had not peered into despite being within us."
Juan José Millás

"Saramago makes an elusive reality comprehensible, with parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony."
Nobel Committee

"A man with a sensitivity and a capacity to see and understand that are far beyond what we ordinary mortals generally see and understand."
Héctor Abad Faciolince

"Saramago is an example, a most dignified style of life and literature, which demonstrates the possibility of sailing against the current [...]. His word has the value of an antifreeze, of a personal remedy against the gales of cynicism that surround us."
Luis García Montero

"I don't know, nor do I want to know, where Saramago got that diabolical narrative tone, both harsh and pious, [...] which allows him to tell stories so close to the heart and at the same time so close to history."
Luis Landero

"Saramago writes novels about myths to demystify them, [...] always to address the reality around him, to deal with current problems that concern everyone, and so that everything is clear from the beginning."
Rafael Conte, Babelia

"Like Günter Grass or Cees Nooteboom, Saramago aims to connect with a public that transcends national boundaries."
El País