I bought this book new. It's about a person who can see in a city which has been struck by an epidemic of blindness.

According to the cover, the book was a NY Times Notable Book of the Year and an LA Times Best Book of the Year. The author is from Portugal, and has won a Nobel Prize for Literature.

I plan for this book to count as my read for Portugal in the Olympic Challenge - an attempt to read books by authors from each country that participates in the Olympics.

This was an interesting book. The reason for the blindness is never explained which strains credibility a bit - but not terribly. The story is thought-provoking and interesting.

I didn't like the run-on way in which dialog is done in this book - the sentences from various speakers are just strung together in long paragraphs and it becomes difficult to keep track of who is speaking.

Sent to katyan.
Went to the Post Office with this on July 25.

This book arrived here today! Thank you, hobbit! And thank you also for the wonderfull postcard "Women working" :)

This book was an intense story of blindness, first it was hard to read but at the end it somehow really touched me deeply. So deeply that I don't even feel to tell too much about it for the next readers, I'll let them to experience it on their own...
This book will travel next to Ahava, who won it in my soon to be PhD RABCK competition.

Thank you katyan (and, originally, hobbit!) for offering me the chance to get to know Saramago. I've tried to read his book on the life of Jesus but it never caught as deeply as this one already has, after the first chapter the book seems to wrap its reader into a tight net. Is this a story of a world where the fool lead the blind? Let's see. See, indeed.

By the way, did you recognise how wonderfully Saramago touches the senses of his readers? In the beginning, when the protagonist still sees something, even the most trivial objects of his surroundings are illustrated in detail. When the man becomes blind, the story seems to jump from visual to tactile and auditory elements. I'm looking (sic!) forward to see, how the narration moves from one sense to another.

Off to Zimbabwe!

Thank you!

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

This book will be part of the library collection of the Zimbabwe AIDS Orphans Dzikwa Activity Centre. Happy reading to all library users!