Volume 46, Number 3 · February 18, 1999
Sightgeist
By Tim Parks
Blindness
by José Saramago, Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero
Harcourt Brace, 293 pp., $22.00
How many proverbs and clichés would have to change if everybody went blind? Could you say, 'I know the place like the back of my hand,' if the back of your hand were something you never saw? Could one usefully speak of 'the blind leading the blind,' if other options were no longer available? Such considerations, you might think, would hardly be of the highest priority in a world suddenly and terribly afflicted by an epidemic of blindness, yet of all the obstacles that José Saramago has his characters blunder against in the suddenly sightless world of his new novel, language is perhaps the most frequent and the most perplexing. 'Just imagine,' remarks one girl, stumbling in the entrance to her old apartment block, 'stairs that I used to go up and down with my eyes closed….' In radically changed conditions, the inertia of common usage constantly generates absurdities. Not only is the shin scraped in contact with cement, but the mind is humiliated as its mindless habits are exposed.
Review, 4445 words
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