Author | gongyouliu
Editor | gongyouliu
Recently, it took less than a week to finish reading the novel "Blindness" by the Portuguese writer Saramago. Saramago is the only Portuguese writer who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature so far, and this book It is his masterpiece. Let's make a brief sharing of this book.
As the title of the book says, the author set up a scene: except for one woman (one of the protagonists), everyone suffers from an unknown eye disease and cannot see due to unknown reasons (not at the same time, but successively) Infected with eye disease), the eyes are white, just like what is written in the book, falling into a white ocean of milk. Since basically everyone can’t see it, the author’s descriptions are basically carried out in the form of dialogue, of course, it also includes information input from other senses such as touch, smell, taste, etc., and rarely uses visual descriptions (except from the only seen See the heroine's perspective).
The subject of this book can be seen as a thought experiment on human nature. When everyone is invisible, observe the goodness and ugliness of human nature through the limited perspective of the only visible heroine. Of course, although other people cannot see, they can perceive the outside world through language and touch, so the descriptions on other sensory organs are also very real.
The storyline of this book is more exciting (compared to other literature books of Nobel Prize winners), and the story is not bad, so that it is not impossible to read (the only obstacle is that there are only three symbols in the book, commas, periods, and semicolons. The original Portuguese There are only commas and periods in the text, and the dialogues are all connected together, which requires a certain amount of patience). The protagonists in the book are mainly the visible heroine (she did not tell everyone that she did not suffer from blindness in the early days of the prison), her husband (an ophthalmologist), another couple, an old man with cataract, a A child, a prostitute (a very good-looking woman who suddenly became blind while having sex with a client), a car thief, and a dozen or so people were among the first to be infected with blindness. After being infected, they were locked up in a psychiatric hospital for isolation. Most of the stories involving the evil of human nature happened in this "prison". Some of the plots involving the evil of human nature may be a bit uncomfortable to read.
There are prison guards' unintentional suppression of blindness, similar to Nazi concentration camps; there is an ophthalmologist (the heroine's husband) who sneaks into the prostitute's bed and has sex with her and is witnessed by his wife; there is blindness in the dormitory next door Gather up (one of them has a gun and is the leader of the bad guys, one of them was blind before, so he is familiar with the world of the blind, and they occupy all the food) The scene of looting other dormitories, which later evolved into the need for other The dormitory uses women's bodies for food. These scenes are similar to the inhumane Japanese invasion of Chinese women during the War of Resistance Against Japan, and many male roommates, even doctors and the husband of another woman acquiesced to this (no objection or no Strongly disapprove of exchanging women's bodies for food, although some of these women have their wives).
Of course, there are also many scenes that shine with the brilliance of humanity. The heroine took advantage of what she could see to kill the leader with a gun by herself; everyone cared for each other's language and actions during the difficult time in prison; later, everyone worked together to set fire to the bad guys' dormitory and escaped from the prison; after escaping from the prison, the hostess took meticulous care of those people in the same dormitory (mainly it was difficult to obtain food, you can imagine how scarce food will be when everyone is blind, how difficult to obtain).
There are also a lot of scenes in the book that depict excrement, filth, etc., which may be uncomfortable, but in the case of everyone blind, these scenes are very real.
Due to my limited level, I didn't study literature before, and I don't especially comment on literary works. The above is just a brief list of some scenes that I think are shocking. Interested readers can purchase and read by themselves. The purchase link is below.
Generally speaking, the idea of this book is quite ingenious. By setting a specific scene through a thought experiment, the complexity and diversity of human nature can be shown very realistically (what I think is true is not necessarily what happened in reality, but It is in this scene that people behave as if they are real, which is also considered a logical and emotional truth). Human behavior will change in specific scenarios. You have not changed, not because you will not change, but because you are not in a certain scene (just like the well-known man who has money and becomes bad, the reason is similar). So, for someone, when you experience more and more complicated scenes, you will get more experience, which may be the wealth of your growth process, or you may not have endured these experiences and eventually lose yourself and lose your humanity .
After reading this book, we can better feel the importance of eyes. Vision is the most important sensory organ of human beings. More than 80% of information is obtained through eyes. The importance of eyes to a person is self-evident. For people with good eyesight, they may not feel the pain caused by missing eyes, and they may not make good use of their eyes to see, observe the world, discover the beauty of nature, and tap the multi-faceted nature of human nature. So the author wrote a sentence on the title page of this book "If you can see, you must see, if you can see, you must observe carefully.".
