![]() ![]() ![]() Yet it works: as the novel establishes its figures (the pompous president, tremulous ministers and pantomime detectives), it acquires the momentum of a bedroom (here, cabinet) farce, baldly sending up EU politicos and major media editorialists. The allegorical blindness/sight framework is weak and obvious, and Saramago's capital city sometimes reminds one of Dr. The president receives an anonymous letter revealing the case of the eye doctor's wife (she and the group she helped had kept her support secret), and the minister in charge of internal security sends undercover policemen to investigate her connection to the "blank" revolution. The president declares a state of siege, but even though soldiers cordon off the city, nothing affects the city's maddening cheerfulness. The man who helps him get safely home goes back and steals his car. The story begins when the first blind man loses his vision in his car while waiting for a traffic light to change. ![]() His new novel, set in the same capital city four years later, depicts a legal "revolution," when 83% of its citizens cast blank ballots in a national election. Saramago uses blindness as a metaphor for both personal misfortune and social catastrophe. , an unnamed capital city experiences a devastating (although transient) epidemic of blindness that mysteriously spares one woman, an eye doctor's wife, who helps a blinded group survive until their sight returns. In Nobel Prize–winner Saramogo's best known novel, Blindness ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |