Blindness by José Saramago

José Saramago is a Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is also a communist and atheist but these things are not obvious in his dark novel, Blindness. In it he posits a city whose inhabitants are stricken with a sudden "white blindness." Perhaps you can read political implications into the resulting chaos, but it was really more about individual suffering.

I found this book difficult to read for a few reasons. First are the run-on paragraphs which sometimes go two pages or more. Within those paragraphs, whole sentences are often not separated by periods but merely by commas. There is lots of dialog but no quotation marks (seems to be publishing style these days). You know someone is speaking just from context and the fact that a word following a comma is capitalized.

Secondly, there are many philosophical ruminations embedded in those long paragraphs and they slow down plot development without really adding much to knowledge of the characters. Thirdly, the book seemed repetitious to me. I was eager to know what would happen to the characters, but dipping into their harsh, bleak world was not exactly fun.