. Spinning .

Cormac McCarthy does that; just when you round a bend you see a tree that looks a little odd…

What Saramago does however is to get the reader riled up on his own and then calm him down. I have found that some of the things that have me making faces in disbelief–like after the previous posting's scenario and when the doctor's wife is so damned understanding she helps her husband back to his own bed–are dealt with in a finer depth a page or two later.

In this instance, as the doctor's wife gently consoles the girl with dark glasses and shares her secret of her vision, there is an empathy between the women and yet I wonder if on some dark level in the doctor's wife she isn't saying "Ha! I watched the whole thing, bitch!"

I think Saramago likes to play with human nature and push people to a point where not only his characters but the readers go through some mental adjustments.

With a small group of men–all from one ward–taking over the distribution of food and demanding payment of all valuables (and, they have a gun), there naturally comes about a societal structure different from the outside world as well as different from what little had been established within the wards.

But the valuables have run out. So the thugs are asking for women.

Saramago gives us no intimate reaction to this, just reports the discussion as the battle of the sexes comes into play and how much male ego can stand, feminine proprieties are offended, and the overwhelming dedication to survival and the cause.  All understandable, and Saramago sort of loses me on the thin line of sociology as it is a rather cold display of what I would assume to be a more dramactic situation, but this sort of got to me more, the doctor's wife once more awake while others in the ward are (supposedly) asleep:

There has been some kind of arrangement made that certain wards will serve their women up first. There has also been some kind of agreement that the men in the wards that send out the women will be taken care of first rather than all the women going off to serve the one horny ward. And, of course, there have been some folks that have coupled out of need for comfort.

But the doctor? I don't know exactly how long these people have been sequestered together, whether a matter of days, weeks, or months, but why is the doctor racing over to "the girl with dark glasses" when he has a truly terrific and loving wife by his side? He knows she can see. He must have known she wasn't beside him in bed when he got up. What the hell's wrong with him? Yes, he knows that his wife will eventually be going off to service one of the thugs, but he claimed that even though his ego was damaged, he understood the necessity.

I don't know. When even the good go bad, and frankly, I don't see why they've let it get to this point, I wonder if Saramago's message on human nature is more negative than reality.

Maybe it's just because I'm in a pissy mood, but I'm not buying this story.

For one thing, Saramago is rather particular about numbers and distances and yet I can't quite grasp how two wings of three wards each, each holding maybe twenty people or so comes out to three hundred people.

Or, the fact that when the last large load of a couple hundred people were moved in, the not-yet blind were of course prevailed upon to give up space and yet we don't really have any but the doctor's wife and possibly a gunman who still can see.

Or the mixup in food distribution, the lack of any medical supplies given to the people, the too-soon attitude of the outside world to have given up on the afflicted, the seeming lack of affiliation as new people are brought in—knowing full well that it appears to spread by some form of contagion, the willingness to give all valuables to one man with a gun when by sound alone they could have overcome him, the lack of the doctor's attempt to find out why his wife can still see, the layout of the courtyard where it seemed to be enclosed by the wings and yet the doctor's wife is out there one night and sees the soldiers at the gate (this I could well be misreading), and a few other things that generally do not quite add up to a picture that is well-painted by the author.

There is also no real interaction between the characters, and this, with Saramago's choice to not quote dialogue takes one out of the story, much like watching a play. There may be a good reason for all this in the scheme of things, as Saramago would be hard pressed to quote dialogue when the characters remain nameless but are referred to instead by "the first blind man," "the doctor's wife," "the man with the black eye patch," etc.

There is, of course, as with all stories about epidemics or devastation of some sort, the ethical and moral questions that come up when man's nature is questioned in a survival situation. From the very beginning of the book when the thief kindly drove the blind man home and then stole his car we saw the inherent evil that comes with opportunity. Saramago takes this further; he gives us pause to consider the spiritual and the concept of punishment:

The soldiers have delivered food and left it in the hallway, halfway between the two wards holding the afflicted and the possibly contaminated and the above scenario is one where the seeing folk are considering taking the food after some of the blind (who according to the rules were to be fed first) have been shot when the soldiers felt threatened.

But these people are hungry and in their minds, survival fights ethics. What I wonder about, however, is that the contaminated are seemingly unconcerned that their particular loved one (the reason they themselves were confined in quarantine) may be in the pile of bodies and blood.

Saramago starts off the story in a familiar place, in traffic stopped at a red light. We begin to feel the restlessness of the drivers, the pedestrians, the anxiety that comes naturally with watching movement that at intervals, comes to a halt, bidden by a change of colored lights.

He then eases us into a conflict, that of one driver not moving at the change to green light. He gives us a list of possible reasons as he brings us closer to the car, the driver waving frantically. And then the moment:

Ah, so by page 2 we already understand the title of the novel. The anxiety we felt at the sudden inexplicable stop in flow of traffic that mimics the halt in what we've come to expect in reality, is released by being given the information.

But the story is just beginning, and we understand that, despite this one buildup of tension that is resolved; we know why, we know the answer. We move on to the next situation as it dawns on us.; the man cannot see to drive himself home and must depend upon a passerby to assist him. In the background looms the real tension: why did he suddenly go blind–and not just normal blind–but a whiteness instead of the blank slate of black we've understood blindness to be.

Okay, Saramago then leads us through the man's accustoming himself to his home environment while he waits for his wife to come home. There is a knocked-over vase of flowers that splinters and cuts him even as the hardwood floor is being damaged from the water. They call and make an emergency appointment with an opthamologist and discover that the Good Samaritan has in fact stolen the man's car. Plenty of action, plenty of tension and conflict, and plenty of emotional reaction as the man wonders what has happened and his relationship with his wife (loving) is seen through their movements.

Somehow we know that this story will not be a simple one for that one detail bothers us more than the horror of McCarthy's dark judge: why is his blindness white?

Saramago has also chosen to not only disregard quoted dialogue, but runs on his sentences into each other in a unique manner:

While it is relatively easy to follow the dialogue and understand who is speaking, I wonder at the purpose other than to quicken the pace of the reading to follow a more realistic conversational pattern. Though Saramago handles it well, I dread thinking about what the copycat, less experienced writers will do with this style