Portugal -  Blindness - José Saramago

This book was recommended to me by Seth Heasley who hosts two great podcasts; Take me to your reader and Hugos There. So a huge thanks to Seth.

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I ordered a copy from my local bookstore, Dormouse Books in Belper, which came an a couple of days.

I had only briefly researched Portuguese science fiction, and found a short story published online, but not found this, and there may a reason for this which i'll talk about later.

The book started off really strong with a very descriptive scene of a man loosing his sight whilst waiting at traffic lights in his car. from the first scene and the first few pages it had me hooked and it had a very similar feel to the Brazilian book I read called: and still the earth. I am never very ken on comparing books, but there was just a familiar feel to them both. Maybe its a language thing, maybe a cultural thing, or maybe just pure coincidence.

The book was such a bleak story of a blindness pandemic, and the book followed the lives of a small group of people in a detention / quarantine center. The book was graphic and pretty disturbing in places, but the sense of bleakness and failure of morality and disintegration of basic human kindness was chilling, mainly because it seemed really quite realistic.

There were some points in the book, where it seemed unrealistic, but maybe that was my lack of empathy with the characters. One of the oddest thing about the whole story was that the names of the characters were never disclossed, it was always; 'the doctor, or ;the lady with the glasses'. This was very odd to start with, but I soon got used to it. During the story, it was commented that blind people don't need names.

Overall a great book, not sure that it is science fiction, it is dystopian, and the reason for the contagious blindness isn't explained. So, to me, this is right on the border of what i would consider science fiction