WM091 Bilingual books: Jose Saramago, Blindness (L'aveuglement)

Nobel Prize–winning author José Saramago’s Blindness evokes a powerful vision of the human spirit, bound by both strength and weakness.  It tells of an unexplained plague of ‘white blindness’ and how initial attempts to quarantine the blind in a disused mental hospital fail to halt its spread.  Saramago’s novel focuses on one group of the blind seeking to survive when they leave the hospital and discover the rest of the world has also gone blind and society has fallen apart.  Blindness is a powerful novel of human nature, the fragility of society in extreme situations and man’s will to survive.

‘Saramago tells his tale with humor and compassion, and with an imagination that is boundless enough to conjure an impossible epidemic without losing sight of the exigencies of actual life, achieving that rare blend of magic and reality in which the fantastical allows us to see our own world more clearly, from a perspective that brings out details we might not have otherwise considered’ - Myla Goldberg, NPR’s All Things Considered.

Dans L'aveuglement, du Nobel portugais José Saramago, une maladie mystérieuse commence à se répandre qui rend aveugle.