In the land of the blind, YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHAT HAPPENS

OK, so finally I read a book for this project that I really disliked. I'll say that's the upside: in the past, if a book gets on my nerves, I'll walk away from it (particularly now that I'm not reading for school). I read enough manuscripts that I'm compelled to read that I'm really not looking for books that don't appeal to me, so my instinct is, once a book irritates me, I'm pretty well done with it, absent outside pressures. Here, I pushed through to the finish, and it's better for me and does more justice to the book, and so on and so forth.

And to its credit, Blindness picks up near the end -- there are a few lovely moments in the piece where our core group of heroes stand up for each other and help each other out, and its finish is gratifying in a way that makes me somewhat re-evaluate my crankiness with the rest of the book -- it is, if nothing else, incredibly effective at conjuring up a sense of claustrophobia and discomfort, which would seem to be its aim.

But. But! I have to say, on the whole, the novel was pretty disappointing. Saramago writes in a freewheeling, sentences-that-last-forever, no-quotation-marks style that's memorable, but that's the only style he employs. It's frustrating -- the unspooling language is the same before a wave of blindness breaks out and our protagonists find themselves quarrantined in a mental asylum as it is in the heat of their trials there, so it doesn't really inform us as to the world or conditions these people find themselves in. (My understanding is that this is a Saramago style generally, not just in this book, which is fine, but it's overbearing and, to me, doesn't really pay off.)

That aside, I found the voice of the novel grating in the extreme. It's written in an omniscient voice, narrated by some outside observer with an ostensibly objective point of view, but along the way routinely stops to pontificate on the larger social implications of what's happening. "You see, in this behavior I've just described we can see that all humanity believes that etc. etc." This is tremendously irritating to me -- again, my preference is for authors like Saunders, who load their writing with unreliable, opinionated narrators whose bloviating must be taken with a mound of salt, but it seems to me that as an author, you no longer get to invent a story and outline how the story illuminates the human condition. It's something that I remember bothering me tremendously when I read Ishmael in high school (which book, for those of you that haven't read it, consists mostly of a gorilla telling the author how human society evolved and what our problem is, and it's all written in this annoyingly Socratic dialogue that has a lot of the author saying "Oh, gee, I never thought of that, you're so right," which after the invention of Modernism should really be put out to pasture) and it still bothers me now. Modern readers understand the artifice of storytelling, so it comes across as really patronizing to pretend that we don't get that authors are inventing the things we're reading.

Well, anyhow. I read Blindness. I'm sure others like (or even love!) it, but it is the inverse of my cup of tea, so there you have it.