Blindness

Blindness
Jose Saramago
(Harvest Books, 1999)

Many novelists are fascinated by the idea of the microcosm–cutting their characters off from society as a kind of social experiment. But whereas books like Anne Patchett’s Bel Canto demonstrate the utopian possiblities in this, Saramago uses this fiction experiment to peer into the darkside of human nature.

Set in an anonymous town, populated by nameless people (referred to as “doctor,” “doctor’s wife,” etc.), Blindness recounts a rash epidemic of “white sickness”–an illness that afflicts instantaneously, suddenly, and leaves its victims totally blind but for a constant white light. Fear takes over the town, and the afflicted are quarantined in an abandoned mental hospital, strictly guarded by soldiers, and with absolutely NO intervention from the outside world. Completely self-contained.

So what happens in a world where all are blind? The living conditions deteriorate to a grotesque degree. The asylum soon becomes a struggle between the strong and weak. Alliances form. Some are helpless. Some take advantage of others. Soon, the number of afflicted spreads beyone what can be held inside the asylum (250 people), to the entire imaginable world in the novel. There’s no one to work the electrical facilities, the water, and a helpless anarchy ensues.

One woman is able to see. She guides her friends with such bravery and strength of heart, that she really is the only remaining link to compassion for the characters in the story. I found myself asking, Do all of our societal courtesies hinge on being able to see one another? If we can’t see the consequences of our actions, then are we “blind” to them?

The narrative style of the book is really interesting. I love Saramago’s narrative voice. I read The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and remember being equally enchanted by the character of the narrator. In Blindness, there is no doubt that the narrator is his own character, even though he takes no part in the action of the novel. He is the storyteller, and every piece of information is filtered through his distinctly authoritative voice. He does not write dialogue in the characters’ voices, nor does he even use standard markers to signify who’s doing the talking. This gives the whole narrative the feel of a fable, which is one of the only ways I was able to endure the horrors I was reading.

Everything is related through a series of fragments, offset by commas. In a way, the reader must grope “blindly” through the text, without our reliable guideposts of punctuation we are so used to using. Yet it is entirely readable and clear. Quite a feat.

Blindness is a vivid fable, and I highly recommend it.

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion (Vintage, 2006)

Joan Didion’s husband of 40 years, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died of a sudden heart attack during a quiet evening in their Manhattan apartment in 2003. They’d just returned from visiting their only daughter, Quintana, in a coma and septic shock at Beth Israel North Hospital.

As the doctor delivers the news of her husband’s death, he characterizes Joan Didion as a “pretty cool customer”–and it’s clear throughout this book that she characterizes herself that way, too. In her memoir chronicalling the year following his death, Didion grapples to maintain this sense of self-identity amidst the inclement emotions of grief, anger, and loss. Using her graceful and level-headed prose, she dismantles her emotions: consulting texts ranging from Freud to Emily Post, she looks at grief objectively in order to understand it, and perhaps, exorcise it. She reads medical books and the autopsy report, employing the “magical thinking” of the title to see what she can do to fix them and make life as it was.

When this method fails, readers experience her sense of marvel at her lack of control over memories and sorrow. She describes it as a “vortex” when one stray thought leads her through a tunnel of memories. She carefully tries to avoid these, but, of course, can’t. Readers learn about their wedding, places they lived, trips they took–all peppered with refrains like incantations against remembering.

The book captures her constant struggle between remembering and letting go (recognizing that her husband won’t need his running shoes when he comes back, for example). She avoids characterizations and descriptions of her husband and daughter, and rather focuses on her very personal memories. Magical Thinking is a personal process for Didion, and readers are witness to her method of maintaining control–one that is heartbreaking, and characteristically elegant,

I did not intentionally coincide my reading of this book with the new Broadway production of it, but it does indeed do so. Just in the last 2 days, I have read reviews of the play by the New Yorker, Time Out New York, and Slate. All three say the same thing: Vanessa Redgrave’s portrayal of Didion is too “theatrical” to capture the elegance, intimacy, and calculation in Didion’s prose. The play does deal with Quintana’s death (which had not yet occurred at Magical Thinking’s writing), and I’m curious to see it for that reason.