Reason #1: The style is...unique. After an extremely contagious and quickly moving plague of blindness strikes a city the government decides to quarantine the blind in an abandoned mental institution to try to contain the outbreak. For reasons unexplained beyond "names are no longer important" in the quarantine, none of the characters are named. The main characters are "the doctor", "the doctor's wife", "the girl with dark glasses", "the first blind man", and "the boy with the squint." They spend the entire book that way.
Which is awkward enough without Saramago's other stylistic choice: there are no quotation marks around anyone's speech, and he doesn't start a new paragraph when a new character begins speaking. This, naturally, makes it difficult to tell exactly who's speaking- or even if they're speaking at all. It works on the level that it's disorienting, so it's kind of like actual blindness in that way. But that being said, shouldn't sound then be the clearest thing? Or clearer, anyway? We would at least be able to tell the difference between two different speakers is all I'm saying.
Reason #2: It's incredibly violent, and graphically so. There are injuries, illnesses, attacks, fights, murders, and (again, graphic) gang rape in spades. Blood. Pus. Guns. Scissors. Did I mention the gang rape? Or, more specifically, multiple gang rapes. One woman is gang raped to death. We hear all about it.
In detail. Did I mention that part?
Reason #3: There's a lot of...excrement. The plumbing at the facility isn't the best and with society breaking down around them the blind stop caring about where they take care of business, as it were. But then the blind leave the facility because it turned out that just about everybody was blind and there wasn't any real need for the quarantine anymore, so we find out that the blind outside the facility stopped caring about...cleanliness, as well. Between the sights (one character can see), and the...smells...and the...depth...yeah, no, it's not pretty.
Reason #4: It's scarily realistic. Everything that happens, given the circumstances, is completely believable. Through the whole book you know- you know- that it's all plausible. And that's terrifying. But it's part of what makes this such a good book.
But that being said, it is a good book if you're the type that reads dramatic, depressing, intense things-- which I am but, for example, my mother is not. I wouldn't recommend this to her if Saramago paid me, she'd hate it. But if this is your thing, it's a can't miss read.
4 stars out of 5.
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