Writing

Blindness by José Saramago
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Blindness" is a post-apocalyptic novel in which a sudden pandemic of "white blindness" spreads through a city. The government initially confines the infected in a mental asylum, but soon no one remains uninfected except a character known only as “the doctor’s wife,” who retains her sight.

Saramago writes in an avant-garde, stream-of-consciousness style, with minimal punctuation, few paragraph breaks, and blurring of dialogue and narration. I was initially concerned that the style would pose difficulty, but that proved unfounded. In fact, it was effective and immersive with several poignantly written lines. An example, which is essentially the "thesis" of the book:

"I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see. ... The doctor's wife got up and went to the window ... Then she lifted her head up to the sky and saw everything white, It is my turn she thought. Fear made her quickly lower her eyes. The city was still there" (Saramago 326).

The middle section of the novel is extremely slow-paced and claustrophobic. It is set entirely within a single ward of the asylum. The small cast of characters remains nameless. This is where the plot stalls the most, and the condition the internees endure is described with painful detail. Of course, these choices are deliberate on Saramago's part, meant to immerse the reader in the confined existence of the blind.

The novel carries two thematic threads. The first is the titular blindness which exists even before the pandemic. Saramago's suggests that the social structures we maintain function largely because we agree not to see certain things: cruelty, poverty, the suffering immediately around us. The epidemic does not introduce a new blindness; it simply removes the layers that made the existing one comfortable and invisible. The second thread follows from this: given that removal, what remains of the human spirit? Saramago's answer is unsentimental. The thugs who seize control of the asylum represent one truth of human nature, while the small group around the doctor's wife, who bears the burden of "seeing," represents another.

My main criticism is that the thematic payoff at the end does not feel entirely worth the journey. While it is earned, it is ultimately a familiar message that lacks the originality or force needed to justify the prolonged stagnation of the middle section. "Blindness" is an admirable book, but not a rewarding one.

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The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The following is not a real review, but more a critical reflection on the novel's politics.

I can say that "The Book of Disappearance" at least prompted the correct questions in me: what is the meaning of a place? how does one react to the inevitable change in culture? whose role is it to adapt?

This book attempts to explore the importance of the Palestinian people to the modern-day state of Israel. It suggests that the Palestinian people have a unique relationship with their homeland, one that many Israelis struggle to fully understand.

One of the main protagonists of the novel is a Palestinian man, who, inheriting much of the nostalgia and bitterness of his grandmother, feels a profound sense of loss living in the modern state of Israel.

Ordinarily, in this debate, my support rests firmly with the Palestinians, unusually, however, reading this novel, I felt myself disagreeing with the Palestinian point of view.

It is one thing to acknowledge the suffering that displacement and violence have caused the Palestinian people. It is another to suggest that a particular people possess an exclusive and immutable relationship to a place. Cultural change, migration, and the transformation of cities are nearly universal historical experiences. Languages fade, neighborhoods change, and identities evolve. The protagonist seems unable to imagine identity outside of memory and loss, clinging to a vision of place that cannot survive historical change. My fear is that such thinking leads to rigid communalism, where unchanging, inherited identity is the determining factor in all of life.

What makes the Palestinian case morally urgent is the violence and dispossession that accompany it, not the mere fact of cultural transformation itself. At times the novel seemed to blur this distinction, presenting cultural loss as something uniquely Palestinian rather than a common feature of human history.

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