Blindness (Vintage classics)

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Things have not improved since the novel’s publication in 1995. Covid-19, it has been pointed out, is inseparable from climate change, from the Anthropocene, or, more precisely, the Capitalocene. Many thinkers view global warming, growing epidemic threats, migrations, social differences, political unrest, and most of our current wars as a consequence of capitalism and colonialism. Saramago underlined many of these interrelations long before the Nobel Prize. But with Blindness, it seems to me, he truly became a Tiresias of our crumbling Western Civilization. Sadly, only the few listen. Rewriting History In 1924, Saramago's family moved to Lisbon, where his father started working as a policeman. A few months after the family moved to the capital, his brother Francisco, older by two years, died. He spent vacations with his grandparents in Azinhaga. When his grandfather suffered a stroke and was to be taken to Lisbon for treatment, Saramago recalled, "He went into the yard of his house, where there were a few trees, fig-trees, olive trees. And he went one by one, embracing the trees and crying, saying goodbye to them because he knew he would not return. To see this, to live this, if that doesn't mark you for the rest of your life," Saramago said, "you have no feeling." [11] Although Saramago was a good pupil, his parents were unable to afford to keep him in grammar school, and instead moved him to a technical school at age 12.

As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that’s bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength. Oscar-nominated director films movie based on a Nobel Prize winning book in Guelph". guelph.ca. City of Guelph. Archived from the original on 2007-10-21 . Retrieved 2007-09-14. Paradoxically, though, the more universal his literary work and thinking became, the more Saramago rooted himself in his Portuguese, and originally rural, identity. Like Jorge de Sena before him, he went into exile, but he also became one of the greatest modern Portuguese humanists and universalists, and a modernizer of the Portuguese and Iberian cultures. His proposed idea of transibericity invites us to think all Iberian cultures together, both before and after the Portuguese and Spanish colonizations, avoiding all hierarchies or impositions. The task, he once said, is of “translating, while respecting the place from which [we] came and the place to which [we] are going.” Kilday, Gregg (2006-11-01). " 'Blindness' gains Focus for int'l sales". The Hollywood Reporter. The Nielsen Company. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30 . Retrieved 2007-06-18. Goldstein, Gregg (2007-09-09). "Miramax nabs U.S. rights to Meirelles' 'Blindess' ". The Hollywood Reporter. The Nielsen Company. Archived from the original on 2007-09-14 . Retrieved 2008-03-11.Abeel, Erica (2008-05-15). "Cannes 08: Fernando Meirelles on "Blindness" ". Independent Film Channel. Rainbow Media. Archived from the original on 2008-09-05 . Retrieved 2008-07-25.

Meirelles screened Blindness privately for Saramago. When the film ended, Saramago was in tears, and said: "Fernando, I am as happy to have seen this movie as I was the day I finished the book." [47] Protests [ edit ] Saramago, José (1922–2010)". Encyclopedia of World Biography. Ed. Tracie Ratiner. Vol. 25. 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005. Discovering Collection. Thomson Gale. University of Guelph. 25 September 2007. The doctor and his wife invite their new "family" to their apartment, where they establish a mutually supportive long-term home. Then, just as suddenly as his sight had been lost, the driver – the first man to lose their sight – recovers his sight, indicating that the body had fought off the disease, and that the blindness is ultimately temporary. They celebrate and their hope is restored.

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The conflict over food finally escalates to the point that a group of hoodlums band together to take control of all the food in hopes of taking all the internees’ valuables. The Doctor’s Wife organizes a resistance to fight against the gang, though it end in bloodshed on her side. In their confrontation, the head of the gang says to the Doctor’s Wife, “I won’t forget your voice,” and she responds without thinking, “Nor I your face” (Saramago 140). Though she can physically see the hoodlum’s face, her threat suggests that only his face could belong to something so evil that would take food away from the rest of the internees. a b "Communist Party of Portugal: Short Biographical note on José Saramago". Pcp.pt. Archived from the original on 7 March 2012 . Retrieved 15 June 2012.

Donzelina Barroso (Winter 1998). "Jose Saramago, The Art of Fiction No. 155". The Paris Review. Winter 1998 (149). Tokyo International Film Festival | "BLINDNESS" Press Conference with Director Fernando Meirelles, Actresses Julian Moore, Yoshino Kimura and more!!". Still, as I already said, Saramago denied being a writer of historical novels, maintaining that his sole commitment was to “reinventing history,” in the sense of bringing to the forefront what has been excluded or silenced. He compared the novelist to the historiographer because he couldn’t conceive an apprehension of the world that was not fictional—just as neuroscientists and cognitivists today maintain that our memory is both highly selective and far from being objective. In one of his most crucial essays, “History and Fiction,” published in 1990, he said that both the writer and the historical researcher are “choosers of facts” and “makers of history.”

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Meirelles was drawn to Blindness (republished this month by Vintage) by the novel's vision of "how fragile our civilisation is, and how easily it can collapse". Yet for Saramago, "I don't see the veneer of civilisation, but society as it is. With hunger, war, exploitation, we're already in hell. With the collective catastrophe of total blindness, everything surfaces - positive and negative. It's a portrait of how we are." The crux is "who has the power and who doesn't; who controls the food supply and exploits the rest". Tens of Thousands of Blind Americans Object to the Movie 'Blindness' ". American Council of the Blind. 2008-09-29. Archived from the original on 2008-10-07 . Retrieved 2008-10-01. Portugal declared two days of mourning. [7] [8] There were tributes from senior international politicians: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil), Bernard Kouchner (France) and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (Spain), while Cuba's Raúl and Fidel Castro sent flowers. [7] All of Saramago’s fiction was about this world—about real people but also animals, about real suffering, about solidarity, about changing circumstances in a humane way, about ethical responsibility. This is why his thoughts and literature could be transformed into a Universal Charter of Duties and Obligations of the Individuals 4 that has already been submitted to the United Nations since, in one of his Nobel Prize lectures, Saramago suggested that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not sufficient to guide humanity.

Siegel, Tatiana (2007-06-12). "3 succumb to 'Blindness' at Focus Int'l". The Hollywood Reporter. The Nielsen Company. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30 . Retrieved 2007-06-18. José Saramago Foundation Statute (PDF), José Saramago, 2007, archived (PDF) from the original on 21 February 2014 a b c Evans, Julian (28 December 2002). "The militant magician". The Guardian . Retrieved 28 December 2002.

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Raised from the Ground by José Saramago – review", Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian, 26 December 2012 Located in an unspecified city and country, the novel tells the story of a strange mass epidemic of blindness and the social breakdown that follows in its wake. Saramago focuses on the misfortunes of a small group of unnamed characters who are the first to go blind, including an ophthalmologist, some of his patients, and others thrown together by chance. Only the doctor’s wife is inexplicably immune. Nobel-wiining[sic] novelist Saramago dies aged 87". The Hindu. Chennai. 18 June 2010 . Retrieved 18 June 2010. In this sense, Saramago’s work is never detached from real life. Whether dealing with impoverished farmers at the beginning of the 20 th century as in Raised from the Ground; the construction of an oversized convent in 18 th-century Portugal as in Baltasar and Blimunda; the magical scission of the Iberian Peninsula as in The Stone Raft; or the sudden disappearance of death in Death with Interruptions, there is always a firm and solid link to our current time and society.