I began reading Blindness on December 10th and only managed to finish it on May 1st. Thanks solely to the power outage that hit Portugal and Spain that day, which left me with nothing else to do.

While many people seem to love this book, I found it bland, excessively negative, and disturbingly macabre. Honestly, it felt like a horrible experience rather than an engaging story.

The fact that Saramago is the only writer from my country to have won a Nobel Prize is astonishing. I’m sure he has written better works, yet it is unsettling that this particular book is one of his most famous. It makes me question the true worth, or perhaps the arbitrariness, of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Specially knowing that Saul Bellow also won it and I didn’t find any of his works particularly spectacular.