Works by Jose Saramago (Study Guide) - Novels by Jose Saramago, Short Stories by Jose Saramago, Blindness, the Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Paperback)

This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Novels by Jose Saramago, Short Stories by Jose Saramago, Blindness, the Gospel According to Jesus Christ, the Double, Seeing, Death With Interruptions, the Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, All the Names, the History of the Siege of Lisbon, the Tale of the Unknown Island, the Cave, the Stone Raft, Baltasar and Blimunda. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Blindness (Portuguese:, meaning Essay on Blindness) is a novel by Portuguese author Jose Saramago. It was originally published in Portuguese and then translated into English. It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel follows the misfortunes of a handful of characters who are among the first to be stricken and centers around a doctor and his wife, several of the doctors patients, and assorted others, thrown together by chance. This group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the unexplained good fortune that the doctors wife has escaped the blindness. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and the social order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion and keep order via increasingly repressive and inept measures. The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, mirroring the society outside. Anxiety over the avai...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=901697