Blindness

I appreciated this book a lot more than I enjoyed it. Saramago writes about an epidemic of blindness and the government's attempt to contain the disease by quarantining the first sufferers in an abandoned mental hospital. The various degradations that the characters experience are very painful to read, and I nearly put the book down several times.

The writing style further contributes to the difficulty of reading. Saramago eschews quotation marks and paragraph breaks in his dialogue, evoking the experience of his newly-blind characters, and following along requires real concentration.

Nevertheless, it's a well-written and powerful book, with several notably awesome female characters, and in the end I thought it worth the effort.

(Review originally written 1/22/2010)