The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, Blindness is a novel approached with high expectations. For the most part these expectations are met and exceeded. What starts out as a singular event, a driver at the traffic lights going blind, turns into the beginning of what appears to be an epidemic. At first authorities try to contain the epidemic by placing those stricken and those they have come into contact with them into quarantine in an old mental hospital. What ensues is a descent into a hell on earth as vividly depicted as any other in literature and recounted with a prose that creates the greatest impact with the minimum of superfluous words. It is the sheer gravity of the subject matter that gives Blindness its impact as we are asked to be witnesses to a catastrophe of as yet unprecedented proportions. The Army soldiers who are charged with the quarantine are in such fear of contagion that they minimize completely their contact with the internees and thus the internees, all but one of them blind, must survive a nightmarish reality where slowly all remnants of civilization vanish.

Seated on their respective beds, the blind internees settled down to await for the pack of thieves to return, Thieving dogs, that's what they are, commented a rough voice, unaware that he was responding to a reminiscence of someone who is not to blame for not knowing how to say things in any other manner.

Regardless of the efforts at quarantine, eventually the entire city's population becomes blind and those quarantined escape the confines of the old mental hospital to wander a city where the survivors blindly grope for any food they can find in abandoned shops or houses. Rubbish and human excrement accumulate on the city streets as packs of dogs descend on carcasses, human or otherwise.

The stench rises from the enormous refuse tip like a cloud of toxic gas, It won't be long before we have outbreaks of epidemics, said the doctor again, nobody will escape, we have no defences left, if it's not raining. its blowing gales, said the woman, Not even that, the rain would at least quench our thirst, and the wind would blow away some of this stench.

Many passages of Blindness are relentlessly depressing as if one were to try and render a modern terrestrial version of Dante's inferno. However, the rewards of reading such a book are many. There is an exploration of the boundaries of civilization in relation to the physical acts of living and of the fragility and importance of human dignity that I have never seen in any other book. At times heavy and oppressive, it is well worth the effort to read in its entirety. A staggering literary achievement.