José Saramago is without any doubt the great writer of Portuguese letters in recent years, and was even awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. In fact, a few years earlier he had written one of his greatest works, Essay on Blindness, published in 1995.
A book that introduces us to a society that is suffering from a real pandemic, in which everyone goes blind. Something that leads to the most tragic situations, since the objective of this psychological plot is, in Saramago's own words:
Everyone in the novel becomes blind, and then you have to survive in unexpected conditions, which brings out the character of each one. Although in all cases the enormous selfishness of the human being is discovered.
A story that revolves around 6 characters, although many others appear throughout the pages of the novel. And curiously none of them have a name, but the author and the readers identify them by certain physical characteristics or some information that has been provided about them in their pre-blindness life. That would be the case of what is considered the main character: the doctor's wife.
The truth is that the tone is one of enormous sadness, practically from the beginning, when he tells us how the epidemic is generated, and how the first blind people end up being confined ina kind of prison. There they are blind and locked up, and there the worst of each one emerges. But the same is true outside, where those who see are supposed to remain. However inside and outside there is an atmosphere of terror, and a type of relationship based on immorality and despair.
That exterior setting takes center stage in the second part of the novel, when humanity is completely blind, except for the aforementioned doctor's wife, who becomes our eyes in such a horrendous panorama. A scenario in which food is scarce, there is no one to heal anyone and everything is fighting for the most minimal needs.
An exhausting struggle and an absolutely overwhelming situation, both for the doctor's wife who becomes the guide of an important group of blind people, and for the reader. Saramago leads us into an oppressive darkness and hopelessness, however, all that atmosphere suddenly disappears, as the blindness also disappears.
That's when we have to reflect, as the author himself does when he writes:
In short, an essential work in the literature of the end of the 20th century, which also has its peculiar continuation in Essay on Lucidity.
