In preparation for our discussion of Blindness, I’ve been surfing the Internet for reviews. The one thing that made me nervous about choosing it is Saramago’s style. It seems like some people really hate it.
From Amazon’s customer reviews: "The author uses run on sentences that go on forever, and the only punctuation he seems to use is commas. And what REALLY bothered me was that he didn't give the characters real names, and when they were speaking it was terribly difficult to tell who was talking. I don't think he even used quotation marks for the dialogue. Very frustrating."
And another: "I hate the way Saramago mixes up his conversations between people into long sentences separated by commas. He makes it distractingly difficult to tell who said what. I suppose its all nice and nobel prizey as far as literary devices, but I find it annoying. There is some merit in this method, but worse is that the story is beriddled with elements that reveal the lack of insight of the author."
From Epinions: "The writing style has been proclaimed by experts to be ‘novel’, I found it tedious. When characters speak, I fully expect to see a paragraph break and some quotes around somewhere to give me fair warning. Whenitisallruntogetheryoubegintowonderifthe attemptatstylewasperhapsgettinginthewayofhisstory. Note: I typed that last sentence that way on purpose to illustrate my point."
What they call bothersome, distracting, and tedious, I consider craft. To me, Blindness is one of the greatest novels ever written and I’m looking forward to finding out what you think.
