BLINDNESS by Jose Saramago

I’m not sure which is worse—living through a pandemic where you could die or one in which everyone goes blind.  Well, almost everyone.  One character claims to be blind when she really isn’t.  She can only keep up this charade for so long, but in the meantime, she is useful to have around, particularly in an abandoned mental institution that will eventually house over 200 blind people.   Since no unaffected person will dare come into the building, these sightless people are basically on their own.  Food and cleaning products are delivered to their doorstep, but it is awfully hard to keep anything clean when everyone is blind.  The result is pure chaos.  Greedy, vicious new arrivals make the situation even worse.  I found the punctuation in the book—no quotation marks, run-on sentences, spotty identification of speakers—annoying, but I think the author had a purpose with the disorderly dialog, perhaps emphasizing the unavoidable confusion among so many blind people in an unfamiliar place.  It is sort of like Lord of the Flies with adult characters.  I found myself totally immersed in the horrific lives of the people in this well-imagined story and eager to find out what lay in store for them.  Their suffering is unfathomable, and yet their hope for a cure or treatment or a vaccine keeps them struggling to survive.  Most amazing and disturbing, though, is that even as more and more people become blind, the government still suggests the possibility that the rampant blindness is not a pandemic at all but just an unfortunate coincidence.