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Book Review of Blindness

Blindness
Chocoholic avatar reviewed on + 291 more book reviews


This is an interesting book about an unknown city in an unknown country that is plagued by an unknown "white blindness" that first strikes a man driving his car. It soon spreads to the man's wife, the doctor who examines him, and other people with whom he has come into contact with. Soon it turns into a national crisis with hundreds of new blind victims turning up daily. The blind are first kept quarantined in an old hospital, guarded by the military, but it quickly becomes apparent that the entire country or city has become blinded, and chaos ensues.

This is a great book written by a talented author, but it has some unique features. First, his sentences are very long and run-on sentences, sometimes going the length of a full page. Secondly, he uses no quotation marks when characters are speaking; you can figure out who is speaking from the other details, but it sometimes gets confusing and I had to backtrack frequently to figure out where I left off. Finally, the characters themselves don't even have proper names like one would expect in a more mainstream novel. Instead, the author identifies his characters by their relations to one another: the first blind man, the first blind man's wife, the doctor, the girl with the dark glasses and so on. Because of all this, it took me longer than usual to read this book, but I'm very glad that I did.

It was an enjoyable read, in the end.