PTN Book Club: Blindness

This month's selection for the book club, Blindness, produced mixed reviews.

Sarah: "Even if the story had been fabulous and not at all predictable I probably still would not have enjoyed this book because of the way in which Saramago wrote it."

Carina: "Perhaps I was supposed to be learning something about the human condition here. I just didn't buy it."

Marc: "even one person's sight and humanity was no match for the moral and literal blindness of the masses."

Paul: "One thing that really interested me was the stance on morality - one of the central question being 'if no one can see our sins, and judge and punish us for them, what is to keep us doing the right thing?'"

CM: "no matter how grim it gets, it never seems farfetched. It feels familiar."

Heather: "I didn't like the way this book was structured. . . . I understood why it was written that way, but I didn't like it."

Tom: "it was 28 Days Later without zombies, or Lord of the Flies with sex."

waterhot: "It's hard to see the story as a fable, and the blindness with which all but one character are afflicted as a metaphor for moral blindness when the survival of the central group of characters is the entirely fortuitous result of their finding themselves in the company of the one person who has retained her vision."

Dylan: "As it's the end of the month, we're supposed to write about the book. Accordingly, I'll tell you why I didn't read it."

dgm: "I started writing a song about it . . . Blinded by the white/Locked up by The Dude/
Another one has lost his sight."

Sui Generis: "The "white blindness" begins like a classic zombie outbreak, with the initial cause of infection sudden and unknown, and is even more dreaded because the method of transmission is mysterious as well."

Zubon: "advertising a rape on the cover does not make me want to read the book more."

Karl: "For me, the most difficult part of reading Blindness stemmed from a childhood of wildly deteriorating eyesight, an eye infection that left me extraordinarily light-sensitive for weeks, and the morning when I awoke to discover my eyes had swollen almost entirely shut from an allergic reaction, which left me near-blind for a few weeks."

Amber: "If it had not been for the book club, I might not have finished Blindness. That probably would have been a mistake, but maybe not much of one."

Thanks to all who participated! I hope we can have an interesting discussion about any issues on which we differed. If you haven't sent in your review yet, e-mail me and I will add it to this post.

Remember, next month's selection is On Beauty. Happy reading.