What they succeed at is immediately creating the easy "us versus them" divide between the helpless newly blind and the terrified seeing. Untouched by human contradictions, animals are more alive because they are more secure than human beings. After publication of the late Nobel Prize winner’s final novel, Cain, along comes the first English-language translation of this early work. Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. Life as we know it, could be changed with the rules of nature, our society, our morals, ethics may not stand the savage duress of existence.

Being raped by one man is bad enough, but when being raped by several men a woman has become an object, not even an object of desire, but merely a receptacle for lust. It's another contagion, where in a city people getting blind randomly starting from a traffic signal and then spreading through looking into their eyes. Perhaps we do, otherwise we may not be reading this great piece of literature after progressing through so many hideous acts- genocides, wars, rapes, murders etc.They’re dead, they can’t do any harm, someone remarked, the intention was to reassure himself and others, but his words made matters worse, it was true that these blind internees were dead, that they could not move, see, could neither stir nor breath, but who can say that this white blindness is not some spiritual malaise, and if we assume this to be the case then the spirits of those blind casualties have never been as free as they are now, released from their bodies, and therefore free to do whatever they like, above all, to do evil, which as everyone knows, has always been the easiest thing to do. Some of the sentences did seem REALLY long with commas where full stops should be, but this really is a minor quibble and should not put anyone off reading this book. Saramago tells us the story of a mysterious mass plague of blindness that affects nearly everyone living in an unnamed place in a never specified time and the implications this epidemic has on people's lives. It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. He was later promoted to senior lecturer and finally Reader in Latin-American Literature in the Victoria University of Manchester until his retirement in 1995.

The most common objection among blind readers to the novel concerns the complete lack of initiative shown by the blind internees even in terms of the most basic bodily functions – we’re talking shitting on the floor folks! Walter Mitty has nothing on Raimundo Silva, the middle-aged bachelor and proofreader in a contemporary Portuguese publishing house who's the protagonist of Saramago's dazzling postmodernist novel. The novel follows the misfortune of a handful of unnamed characters who are among the first to be stricken with blindness, including an ophthalmologist, several of his patients, and assorted others, who are thrown together by chance. However, there are some signs that hint that the country is Saramago's homeland of Portugal: the main character is shown eating chouriço, a spicy sausage, and some dialogue in the original Portuguese employs the familiar "tu" second-person singular verb form (a distinction absent in most of Brazil).Given the characters' blindness, some of these names seem ironic ("the boy with the squint" or "the girl with the dark glasses"), his style reflecting the recurring themes of identity and meaning, showing the imbecility and impotence of the existence of the characters. The novel concerns ‘the white evil’ a highly contagious pandemic that causes people to go blind and see nothing but whiteness. Desperate needs, inequality of power, shameless gang mentality, helplessness in an exposed situation, loss of control, all these things play a role.