Blind (Ensaio sobre a cegueira)

A great fable for a profound examination of the human condition.

The only Portuguese-language Nobel Prize winner in history

José Saramago's most popular masterpiece handed down from generation to generation, new edition of the century

Blindness suddenly raged in a certain country, and the people went blind one after another. I don't know where they got infected...

It's scary not to be invisible, but what's even more terrifying is to know that the other party can't see...

Darker than darkness, an inescapable human fear.

World classics as famous as "Nineteen Eighty-Four", "The Trial" and "The Plague"

Ranked in the "Guardian" selection of "the 100 best literary works of all time"

Guided reading by Zhang Shuying, Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages, National Taiwan University, recommended by author Tong Weige

"His fables, supported by imagination, compassion, and irony, constantly make us realize an elusive reality." ── Nobel Prize in Literature Award Speech

A driver who was waiting for a traffic light on the main road suddenly realized that he could not see and could not move. After he was sent home by passers-by, he saw that the driver's wife had also lost her eyesight, so he secretly stole the blind driver's car , Then the thief and passers-by were also blinded. A blindness disease spread so rapidly that even ophthalmologists could not see, and the whole city fell into chaos, so the government ordered all blind people to be sent to a mental hospital, and sent armed soldiers to guard it. "How fragile life is when it is abandoned." In that hospital abandoned by the world, appalling incidents erupted one after another. Everything that happened in the hospital fell into the eyes of the doctor's wife. In order to take care of her blind husband, she lied that she was also blind. , in fact, she could see it, but she couldn't avoid witnessing it all.

When you lose the light in your eyes, you lose respect for people.

Blindness is the abyss of depravity.

Saramago, who was born in poverty and has a low education level, is an outlier among the Nobel Prize winners. Suffering from political persecution, he did not return to the literary world until he was over 50 years old. However, he challenged the discipline of the state and the church with his creative practice. Standing on the left, on the side of the people, paying attention to politics and being socially aware, he does his writing with integrity. "Blindness" uses the beginning and end of an unknown plague to let readers see the unexposed and bottomless abyss of human nature. The most frightening thing is that it is probably the self that has not been discovered. In order to pursue a fair and rational society, this Nobel Prize winner believes that power is hidden in invisible places, so he fabricated fantasy fables one after another to resist all ideas and dogmas, and worry about the current situation of human beings with imaginative stories. As the author of the book said: "Don't lose yourself, don't let yourself get lost."

"The impossible, the possibility of dreams and hallucinations, are the themes of my novels." --José Saramago

If you can see it, look carefully,

If you can look carefully, observe carefully.

Perhaps the truth of things can only be revealed in the blind world.