Απόρησα, αγχωθηκα, θύμωσα, αγανάκτησα, τρόμαξα, αηδίασα, λυτρωθηκα. Το έζησα όλο το βιβλίο από την πρώτη πρόταση μέχρι την τελευταία. Συγκλονιστικό!!!!

رمان کوری از بهترین اثر های ساراماگو هست .. روایت کوری ای که از مذهب شروع میشه و بسرعت تبدیل به اپیدمی میشه که نتیجه اش ایجاد میلیتاریسم و نظامی سالاری میشه .. ادمای کوری که چشم دارن اما نمیبینن ..نیجه این ندیدن اما تن دادن به دیکتاتوری و ذلت و الوده شدن جامعه و از بین رفتن کرامت انسانی و سقوط ازاد اخلاقی جامعه اس .. زن دکتر تنها ادمی هست که هنوز میبینه .. با این حال این دیدن و این آگاهی داشتن یا به تعبیری خردمند بودن به بخشی از مشکل تبدیل میشه و نه بخشی از راه حل .. جالبه که تنها ادم اگاه جامعه یه زن انتخاب شده ..نه یک مرد ..زنی که شجاع هست و قوی ..با این حال دونستن زیاد براش درد و رنج بهمراه میاره ..در نهایت تدبیر همین زن راه رو برای برگشت بینایی باز میکنه .. از سبک خاص ساراماگو با پاراگرافای طولانی و بی زمان اگر بگذریم رمان خوب و روونی هست .. پر از تمثیل و تلمیح ..

n  

“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.”

nJosé Saramago’s Blindness can be viewed as an allegory for a world where we see but in fact neglect what is around us. It is a human condition, unquestionable a disease that in contemporary time has only agravated.

"..blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone."

Blindness is more than a dystopian novel, it is a philosophical work that makes us wonder about our way of living. Moreover, it brings forth the horrifying truth of how the loss of only one sense can almost instantly dismantle our society, our civilization crumbles to nothing. People are reduced to living in unimaginable filth and rummaging for food and water like animals.
n  

"We're going back to being primitive hordes, said the old man with the black eyepatch, with the difference that we are not a few thousand men and women in an immense, unspoiled nature, but thousands of millions in an uprooted, exhausted world, And blind, ..."

nSo, it is all about being human, with its own fundamental virtues and vices. In a world without vision only our voices remain. A revolution, you could say: people are no longer identified by their appearances, now worthless. Outward values are replaces by what kind of person each one is. Social statuses as we knew them are no more. And in a new disorganized world:
n  

"There must be a government, said the first blind man, I'm not so sure, but if there is, it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness. Then there is no future..."

nSaramago’s work reminded me of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, both are about the crumbling of our civilization as we know it. Blindness is a masterpiece and an important reminder for us to be appreciative of several things that we take for granted, to look around and really see. Without an honest and accurate vision our very existence can disintegrate.
___

Un auténtico cinco estrellas, y créanme que hasta a mí me parece una frivolidad empezar de esta guisa tras leer la genial brutalidad que acabo de terminar (por fin me reconcilio literariamente con Saramago, un tipo que me caía, que me cae, muy bien).

n   “Dejadlos; son ciegos guías de ciegos; y si el ciego guiare al ciego, ambos caerán en el hoyo” Mateo 15:14 (representado en la portada de mi edición por el cuadro «La parábola de los ciegos», del pintor flamenco Pieter Brueghel el Viejo) n

En su plano más superficial, el planteamiento y desarrollo bien podría ser el de una novela de Stephen King. Imagino que todo el mundo está al tanto: alguien al volante de su coche se encuentra parado ante un semáforo, de repente se queda ciego, de una ceguera blanca. Es el inicio de una “epidemia” que se irá extendiendo irremediable y descontroladamente.

n   “… cuando el cuerpo se nos desmanda de dolor y de angustias es cuando se ve el animal que somos” n

El estilo, el habitual del autor, es lo que marca la diferencia: un narrador de formas burocráticas, un funcionario juguetón y con retranca que valora “el uso de un vocabulario correcto y educado… la descripción de cualquier hecho gana con el rigor y la propiedad de los términos usados”. A veces se hace el simple con acotaciones que parecen remarcar innecesariamente, con un discurso plagado de refranes y frases hechas, mientras que en otras demuestra gran sutiliza y profundidad. Un narrador que se involucra con lo narrado y los personajes sin nombre que lo protagonizan, disculpando, comprendiendo y justificando ciertos hechos, aunque su diligencia no le permita cambiar el tono en ningún momento por dramático que este sea.

La novela muestra la fragilidad de las sociedades humanas. La ceguera nos iguala en las circunstancias, el dinero y la riqueza dejan de marcar diferencias, la familia, las relaciones, el trabajo ya no son factores de estratificación, solo queda la persona desnuda (”Dentro de nosotros hay algo que no tiene nombre, esa cosa es lo que somos”), lo que determinará nuevas formas de interdependencia y de relaciones de poder en una sociedad sin gobierno ni justicia donde imperará la ley del más fuerte y del que menos escrúpulos tenga que se aprovechará de la facilidad con la que, por muy mal que ande la cosa, “es posible hallar una ración suficiente de bien para que podamos soportar esos males con paciencia”.

n   “… los sentimientos con que hemos vivido y que nos hicieron vivir como éramos, nacieron de los ojos que teníamos, sin ojos serán diferentes los sentimientos, no sabemos cómo, no sabemos cuáles… lo que está naciendo es el auténtico sentir de los ciegos, y sólo estamos en el inicio, por ahora aún vivimos de la memoria de lo que sentíamos…”n

A partir de aquí se puede buscar una analogía con el capitalismo salvaje al que parecen tender nuestras sociedades y la ceguera con la que asistimos a tal evolución, la pasividad con la que nos sometemos a situaciones cada vez más precarias e injustas y a lo que ello nos puede abocar mientras esperamos a que la solución venga del cielo (potentísima esa imagen de las pinturas y tallas de una iglesia con los ojos cegados por pintura o trapos).

n  "La ceguera también es esto, vivir en un mundo donde se ha acabado la esperanza"n

:شاید بشه گفت تمام بار معنایی این کتاب رو همین یک جمله به دوش می کشید

اگر نمی توانیم همانند انسان زندگی کنیم ، دست کم بکوشیم همانند حیوان زندگی نکنیم

Κ-Α-Τ-Α-Π-Λ-Η-Κ-Τ-Ι-Κ-Ο!!!!!!!!

این رمان آخرالزمانی با یک فاجعه استعاری از بلایی حرف میزنه که در قرن اخیر بر سر بشر مدرن اومده: کوری
اما این بار کوری سفید
فکر میکنم معنای کوری سفید این باشه که ما از شدت داشتن اطلاعات دیگه اون چیزی که باید بفهمیم را نمیفهمیم و چیزهای اساسی را نمیبینیم
فیلمی هم بر اساس این رمان ساخته شده که مثل همهء موارد مشابه پیشنهاد میکنم یا فیلم را اصلا نبینید یا این که لااقل تا قبل از خواندن رمان نبینید
چون این رمان از اونهاست که برای ساختن تصاویر در ذهن خودتون واقعا باید تلاش کنید و فیلم همه اون تصاویر ذهنی را نابود میکنه.

I had been idle on goodreads for several months due to a form of torpor arising from being workaholic. I had been toiling hard at my work to impress my superior and, concomitantly, get a hike or promotion (God knows why! No matter how much I get persistent in shunning the beaten track of life, I again get sucked back to it as if the common-place life is a giant blackhole, always ready to engulf back those who go astray from it). One day, 18th feb 2016, I started reading Blindness by Jose` Saramago for no particular reason. Saramago, the Portugese writer, gave me a ticket instantly for a mental sojourn outside of the mettlesome and cumbersome reality that I am in, trapped. I am grateful. Into the pages, I dissolved. I grew wings and I flew into the realm of Blindness. My mind’s eye closed revealing a luminous white ‘blindness’, while my physical eye trudged past enthusiastically the haunting sequence of words that flows with a never ending turbulence. The full-stops are frighteningly less… before you reach a full-stop after series of run-on sentences, you will already be panting. But the exhaustion is an exhilarating one, not enervating. This is an exhaustion you get addicted to. Thank you Saramago for pushing me into a delectable state of exhaustion.

An unknown person in an unknown land suddenly plunges into a strange blindness in the middle of a road. His visual canvas is suddenly painted all white, milky white, obliterating the colourful painting his vision once was, by an unknown ‘brush’. He sees nothing but absolute white. He screams out of sheer despair, out of sheer terror. Thus ‘Blindness’ has been born, unprecedented and devoid of any explanation. The eyes that fell victim to this white sickness didn’t spare anyone that had normal vision. With an unswerving determination, the disease spreads like an inundating fog. The government, in a frantic attempt to curb the unprecedented cataclysm, decides to confine the initial victims. An erstwhile mental asylum was chosen as the quarantine. Thus came together the characters of our story : Doctor, Doctor’s wife, first blind man, first blindman’s wife, car-thief, girl with glasses, boy with the squint and the blackman with eyepatch. In the realm of blindness ‘Names’ are insignificant, meaningless. In the realm of blindness, all factors like beauty, features, expressions, gestures diffuse into an all-obliterating white mist. The person’s identity narrows down to his voice alone. The voice that speaks out his soul.

Who are you? I am the voice that you hear

No matter what conditions strike humanity, there exists an animal nature that clings to everyone like a leech. Altruism and magnanimity are just a garb that one dons in good times. As soon as the wards of the asylum get inundated with victims, the animal nature looms out as the shortage of food and water became harrowing. As everyone is blind, there is no masquerade left for the animal instinct, and it sticks its head out in all its selfish ferocity. Hunger and despair drive everyone to madness. A clique of ruffians takes over the asylum using armed coercion, wresting control over the food and its supply. Soon the ruffians demanded women, money as payment for providing sustenance to the blind internees. Amidst the cataclysm of blindness and the paucity of life-sustaining food, the blind internees are forced to surrender their pride, their masculinity, their soul. Will they strike back? You got to read to know everything in its complete form.

Saramago created an all powerful dystopian fable that is so haunting and so eye-opening that, we understand that once the deceptive and alluring vision is lost, the beautiful garb our soul has donned– our body- no longer exists and the soul itself looms out of the surface, revealing its fang. This animal nature resulting from the utmost despair and haplessness is beautifully portrayed in this ghastly novel of paramount significance. Excerpts from the novel expounds why humans are selfish and animal-like in the utmost sense:

“Many hours have passed since he last asked his mummy, but no doubt he will start to miss her again after having eaten, when his body finds itself released from the brute selfishness that stems from the simple, but pressing need of sustenance.”

“When the bowels function normally, anyone can have ideas, debate, for example, whether there exists a direct relationship between the eyes and feelings, or whether the sense of responsibility is the natural consequence of clear vision, but when we are in distress and plagued by pain and anguish that is when the animal side of our nature becomes most apparent”

Saramago painted a very accurate picture of the’ blind’ world. He even refrained from naming his characters which is meaningless in an incorporeal world of blindness where a person is merely the voice he utters, and he possesses nothing, even the 8 or 9 inches of land his feet is on.

Among the characters, Doctor’s wife is a tantamount to perfect composure and maturity. When all the blind people turned to mere hungry animals, she with her unswerving determination fed and guided the people she loved, saving them from a very terrible abyss. She is akin to Ma Joad of Grapes of Wrath, both being composed and essentially matured in the face of debilitating reality. But Doctor’s wife is much more intellectual than Ma Joad ( a simple lady) and has a philosophical inclination, if that is a big difference. She, the only one who could see, carried into her arms all the mentioned above, guiding them like a mother. She transcended her limitations as being a wife, a well-bred middle aged woman as you can see as you read the novel (I don’t wish to reveal anything that is important).

I personally have chosen at random a dialogue by Doctor’s wife which shows how sturdy her character and resolve is, which is absolutely essential for anyone who is facing a crisis.

“Do we have enough strength for this task of carrying this dead woman, asked the girl with dark glasses, The question is not whether we have enough strength, the question is whether we can allow this to ourselves to leave this woman here, Certainly not, said the doctor, Then the strength must be found.”

As I turned the last page, though I was joyfully tired, a sharp pang of sadness developed in my heart. The strange, ensorcelling sojourn into the literary genius of Saramago has been fruitful, satiating. To revisit once more, though briefly, the world I visited, I, furtively, closed my eyes feigning that I am blind. Blindness. I smiled.

5 stars on 5!
-gautam

En definitiva, este es uno de mis libros favoritos.

Trama imponente, inicio intrigante y una larga metáfora sobre las cosas que ignoramos. Los humanos somos ciegos ante muchas cosas que creemos no importan.

Si, Saramago escribe con la cola jaja, pero lo quiero mucho porque aun con su estilo tan poco ortodoxo, lo disfrutas.

La primera vez que lo leí, me enfoqué más en la parte de ficción. En esta segunda relectura, pude apreciar las notas del narrador que le dan el título a la novela. Simplemente fascinante.

Recomendado. ¿Tocará relectura de "Las intermitencias de la muerte"?

I don’t write reviews.

As I prepare to write private-public notes stating my thoughts on this utter travesty of… I mean -coughs- on this Nobel Prize Winning m-m-masterpiece… shit. I ask that Saint Ellison, as always, encourage me to speak my opinion loudly and clearly, without care for the crowd. I don’t think I’ll have a problem doing that. (I go in no-holds-barred. You’ve been warned).

This is a mess of a book. Not just because it’s written badly, oh no! It’s literally FULL of shit. The preoccupation with excrement is telling. This man hates humanity and gives them less credit than the worst pessimists I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. One day into a forced quarantine and twenty blind people are crapping on the floor because “no one will see.” They have to live in this place indefinitely but Jose says they’d shit the bed right off, because humanity is bad.

I started feeling strange about this story after the setting is described and our characters are in place. Why? Because he stopped telling a story. Instead, bless his simple soul, he started using the situation he set up to wax romantic about Marxism and communist theory.

Knowing this, it makes sense that he didn’t bother to name the characters. In true Marxist form, everyone is labeled by their jobs or unchangeable characteristics. Intersectionality is dehumanizing and still leads you down to the truth - each man is special and different, not a member of an oppressed class. If you keep labeling, you’ll come to the truth of the person, that being, he is who he is, not what the world throws on him. Jose loves things and labels though, so we have characters like “the doctor’s wife” and “the old man with the black eye patch.” Fucking riveting commentary, Jose!

Randy old political Jose goes so far as to have a bunch of men come in and “control the means of distribution,” straight-up the blind robbing (and raping) the blind. Ok Lizz, but THAT’S the story right? No. He used this to tell us how tyranny offers a kind of predictable safety that individual responsibly lacks. He has his female characters OFFER THEMSELVES to be gang-raped for a little more assured tyranny. Including VERY descriptive scenes of women forced to give post-coitus fellatio to random men or they would withhold food. Brave feminist characters they are, said fuck you, right? Nah. They sucked.

Finally, the lying still-sighted doctor’s wife does a thing. But not before the doctor cheats on her. Yes he does right in front of her KNOWING she can see. Afterwards they doctor’s wife has a touching moment reaching over him to talk softly and lovingly with the adulterous woman. Jose you’re dead now, but in life you lived on planet earth right? This man claims his philosophy is love overcoming all. Yet he purposefully breaks the main strength of love, fidelity. Then he spits in its face.

I’m done now. I’m angry at this. Everyone thinks this is such a great novel. That the bad writing is an amazing breaking of the rules by a master. I see it like this: these people adore CIA-run Nextflix and mainstream news too. They watch super hero movies and think we need more big government. (I know there are still some thinking people out there and it’s to you I’m writing). So cool, love this book. As the world declines, books like this stand as records of how we lost our humanity and reveled in our decline like pigs in shit.

This book was brutal in the most literal sense of the term. It looks at how humans can devolve into savages when put in certain situations, in this case when a 'white blindness' epidemic breaks out and causes people to suddenly lose their sight for no explicable reason.

Saramago is a pretty harsh critic, it seems, of organized structures like government or religion—and that's most clearly seen in the ways that the affected people create communities, how they respond to crises, and ultimately how they serve or hurt one another in this novel.

Despite its darkness, the book also showed some hope for the ways we can see one another, and through that seeing bring light into the world. The acts of service the characters do, or are willing to do even if not performed, for one another are astonishing, heartbreaking, but ultimately uplifting. I think that's what the author wants us to focus on the most and that's definitely what I will take away from this book.

If you're a fan of McCarthy's  The Road, I think you'd enjoy this one as well; not only for its themes, but also its stylistic choices (no proper nouns, long sentences, and lack of quotation marks). I am definitely interested in checking out more of Saramago's work after this one.

وقتي مي توانی ببينی، نگاه كن
وقتي ميتوانی نگاه كنی، رعايت كن

کتاب "كوری" انسان ها را از انتهای ناگوار راهي خبردار می كند كه با رعايت نكردن حقوق اوليه انسان ها آغاز مي شود. ساراماگو اين انتهای تمدن را طوري به نمايش درآورده كه در صحنه اي آنقدر متاثر شدم كه كتاب را محكم بستم و نمی توانستم بازش کنم و ادامه بدهم... به قول يكي از قهرمانان كتاب نمي توان هيچ كلمه اي حتی وحشتناك برای اين فاجعه متصور شد
سير داستان قهقهرائي است يعني همه چي دارد به طرف بي نظمي و عدم سازمان دهي كشيده مي شود و انگار همانند فيلم بنجامين باتن زندگي مي خواهد از پيري به شروع خودش برگردد يعني هيولا*مي شود
...و "کوری" در مورد چنین روزی است

...ما که از مَردی مُردیم لا اقل تو زن باش
مسیحای این کتاب یک زن است که سرشار از صفات برجسته و والای انسانی است از فداکاری گرفته تا کمک کردن به کوران و بخشش. وی حتی بر خیانت شوهر کورش چشم می بندد. او تنها کسی است شدت فجایع را با چشمانش می بیند و درد می کشد اما تسلیم ناپذیر همچون مسیح، یک تنه صلیب را بر دوش می کشد

*
در مقدمه كتاب، آقاي عباس پژمان از رنگ سفيدي می گوید كه همه كوران اين كتاب به اين كوري دچار مي شوند
و از فلسفه ارسطو میگوید که هر چيزي خامش ،هيولا و يا خاويه ناميده مي شود يعني سنگي كه هنوز به شكل مجسمه در نيامده ،هيولاي مجسمه است
و اولين كوري در چراغ راهنمايي اتفاق مي افتد كه چراغ راهنمايي شامل سه رنگ قرمز و زرد و سبز است كه از رنگ سفيد بوجود مي آيند