Kim M. (Eucalia) reviewed on 2/6/2009 + 52 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

What would happen if over the course of a few weeks everyone in the world went quickly, irrevocably and inexplicably blind? How would we survive? What would become of our society? To what lows would we stoop? It's an interesting and frightening premise. What would you do if one day you found yourself to be the only sighted person left in a world where everyone else has gone blind? The story is powerful and gut-wrenching and well worth the read if you can get over the writing style. But that's a big if. There is a distinct paucity of punctuation in this novel. There are no quotation marks despite many conversations making it sometimes difficult to tell who's speaking, sentences ramble on such that more than four on a page is a rarity, and paragraphs continue for pages--one paragraph I counted took up 14 pages. At first I found this very distracting and I had difficulty paying attention through the monotony of the punctuation-good luck finding a stopping point--but eventually I got used to the writing style. My big questions, though, is: why? What's the point of writing this way? The story also lacks personal identifiers. We never know which city or even what country the story takes place in and no characters are referred to by name, only by designations such as "the boy with the squint" or "the girl with the dark glasses." You'd think that the author would've gotten tired of writing "the old man with the black eyepatch" when "Bob" would have served just as well, but I found this bit of quirkiness to make the story more interesting instead of less. This book was originally written in Portuguese and it was filled with lots of sayings I'd never heard before, which I very much enjoyed. This is a thought-provoking book that I'd recommend to anyone who won't be too put off by the writing style.

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