Blindness

A man waiting at a red light suddenly goes blind, not into darkness but into a featureless white, and the affliction spreads through the unnamed city with no warning and no explanation. José Saramago follows a small group caught in the first wave, an ophthalmologist and his wife, a girl in dark glasses, a boy with a squint, an old man with an eye patch, none of them ever given proper names, since the epidemic itself has already erased the ordinary distinctions a name depends on. The doctor's wife alone keeps her sight, and hides it, choosing to be interned alongside her husband in the disused asylum the government uses to quarantine the blind rather than admit what she can still see.

Conditions inside the asylum collapse fast. Armed internees seize the food deliveries and begin trading meals for valuables and, soon, for the women in the other wards, and Saramago narrates the resulting violence and rape without flinching and without melodrama, in the same long, largely unpunctuated sentences he uses for everything else in the book. The doctor's wife eventually leads a small group out of the building and through a city that has stopped functioning entirely, its stores looted, its streets fouled, ordinary government and services gone. Sight returns just as suddenly and as inexplicably as it left, block by block, until the group that survived the asylum finds itself simply living again in the doctor's own house as the blindness lifts around them.

Saramago drops periods in favor of commas and does away with quotation marks entirely, so dialogue runs directly into narration with no visual cue to separate one speaker from the next, a style that forces a reader into something close to the same disorientation the characters feel. It is a difficult, demanding read for exactly that reason, and it suits someone willing to trade comfort for the effect only that discomfort can produce, a novel about seeing that makes its own reader work harder to see clearly.