Everybody lies

This guy received a Nobel Prize for his writing. So I guess I should be impressed by this book.

Sadly, I wasn’t. When I first heard of it, I quite liked the premise of the story: people are going blind for no discernible reason and slowly the so-called civilized society is breaking down as everybody tries to survive as best he can.

So far, so good. Of course, the idea of a total breakdown of society after a disastrous event isn’t really new at all. But since I am very fond of dystopian fiction I fully expected to love this book. Unfortunately, even though the initial situation with people going blind from one second to the next surely was scary and disturbing (even more so for me, since I am suffering from Glaucoma and am facing a very real possibility of going blind eventually), it all went downhill from there.

The story itself is easily told: since the blindness seems to be contagious, the first blind people are rounded up and quarantined all by themselves in a former mental asylum. They have to fend for themselves, which being newly blind, isn’t really possible, so they’re rapidly descending into a very sorry state of chaos. The only thing holding them together is the one person in there still able to see (the wife of one of the internees, who didn’t want to leave her husband). Subtly, she helps maintaining order, while trying to keep her secret. When ever more internees arrive, the situation gets worse and worse. Outside, order is crumbling as well as more and more people turn blind. Eventually, there is a fire in the asylum and most of the internees break out, only to find out that meanwhile everybody else has turned blind, too. The only seeing woman leads her group to their respective houses, to see if they can find relatives. In the end they end up in her own apartment, where they are trying to figure out how to go on living in a world full of blind people, when suddenly, one by one their sight returns.

So much for the story. Does it sound a bit less than overwhelming? Well, that’s because it was. Wyndham certainly did make a much better job of the same situation with his “The Day of the Triffids”back in the fifties.

But that’s not my main gripe with this book. I don’t even know where to start, because there’s so much that is wrong with this book.

One thing that really annoyed me from page one was the book’s style. There are virtually no paragraphs, dialogue is not marked as such - you have to infer it from the context. Sentences run on endlessly, sometimes changing topic halfway through. Punctuation is erratic, to put it mildly. There are virtually no chapter breaks, the story just runs on and on and on, being one big messy blob. Morevoer, none of the characters are named, which makes it necessary to cumbersomly call them “the girl with the dark glasses” or “the boy with a squint”, and - my favorite! - “the dog of tears”. Jeez. Overall, it just isn’t really readable. The whole thing feels like a hastily scribbled first draft. If that guy wasn’t an overhyped Nobel Prize winner, he never would have gotten away with that stuff.

Also, I feel to publish such a book is a slap in the face of every other writer, who makes the effort to write in a way that is enjoyable to read - no matter the subject. A really good writer can actually tell a harrowing story in a way that is touching and graphic and relentless in its intensity without sacrificing readability. To stoop to a cheap literary device like this stream-of-consciousness style of writing just tells me that Saramago is not one of those good writers.

His characters are cardboard cutouts. None of them felt in any way real, no matter how much we heard about their backstory. They all did unreasonable, unbelievable, completely stupid things all the time that left me shaking my head in disbelief. The good guys were too good to be believable, the bad guys were too steroetypically bad. The descriptions of the filth and degradation in the asylum went on for ages and seemed totally contrived as well. I just didn’t buy any of it. I didn’t feel like I was there, because I didn’t believe the way he told it was the way it would have happened. He didn’t convince me of any of it. And that alone is the worst failure an author can suffer.

The other thing that drove me up the wall was his predilection for straying off topic. He could just never stick to the plot. Instead he went off on a tangent, moralizing, or going on endlessly about one person’s faults and mistakes, or just generally blathering on uselessly for a page or two, before returning to the point. That totally got on my nerves. Not only did it interrupt the flow of the story, I also don’t appreciate authors trying to hit me over the head with their views on morality or the human condition, or anything else for that matter.

If you have something to say about humankind as a whole, weave it into your story and trust me to get your point. Don’t bore me to death by inserting your personal views on matters into a fictional story. When I read a novel I am interested in the story. If you want to share your personal opinions with the masses, write a damn essay.

I mean, I get it: the story was meant metaphorically. In a way we are all blind, because we choose just not to see certain things, and if we could just open our eyes to the truth …. bla, bla bla. I’m still not impressed. Tolkien once said that he disliked metaphor and allegory in all its forms. Once again, I can only agree with him.

So, what exactly did Saramago get the Nobel Prize for? I sure hope it was not for this book.