Blindness (Vintage classics)

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Julianne Moore as the Doctor's Wife, the only person immune to the epidemic of blindness. Her sight is kept a secret by her husband and others, though as time goes on, she feels isolated in being the only one with sight. [5] Moore described her character's responsibility: "Her biggest concern in the beginning is simply her husband. But her ability to see ultimately both isolates her and makes her into a leader." The director also gave Moore's character a wardrobe that would match the actor's skin and dyed blond hair, giving her the appearance of a "pale angel". [5] Wright, Thomas (4 April 2010). "The Notebook by José Saramago: The Nobel laureate's blog entries burn with passion". The Independent. Archived from the original on 17 June 2022 . Retrieved 4 April 2010. Bloom, Harold (2003). Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-52717-3. The José Saramago Foundation was founded by José Saramago in June 2007, with the aim to defend and spread the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the promotion of culture in Portugal just like in all the countries, and protection of the environment. [41] The José Saramago Foundation is located in the historic Casa dos Bicos in the city of Lisbon. His later novels became much more successful, though he met much opposition from both the Catholic Church and the Portuguese government because of Communistic and anti-religious undertones. Baltazar and Bilmunda (1982) criticized the role of Catholicism in 18th-century Portugal. The Church criticized The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), claiming that Saramago’s depiction of Jesus was too human and offensive to the Church (Saramago, “Autobiography”). Because the government was very much influenced by the Church, it did not allow this novel to be presented for the European Literary Prize. Many of Saramago’s supporters protested the decision. Later on, Saramago moved to the Canary Islands with his second wife, Pilar del Río, because the support he received inspired him to write even more. There, he wrote his two most famous novels, Blindness (1995) and All the Names (1997).

Shortly before his death, Saramago gave German composer Anno Schreier the rights to compose an opera based on the novel. The libretto is written in German by Kerstin Maria Pöhler. Like the German translation of the novel, the opera's title is "Die Stadt der Blinden". It saw its first performance on November 12, 2011 at the Zurich Opera House.

Echeverría, Julia (2017). "Moving beyond Latin America: Fernando Meirelles's Blindness and the epidemic of transnational co-productions". Transnational Cinemas. 8 (2): 113–127. doi: 10.1080/20403526.2017.1249072. S2CID 151506780. An English-language film adaptation of Blindness was directed by Fernando Meirelles. Filming began in July 2007 and stars Mark Ruffalo as the doctor and Julianne Moore as the doctor's wife. The film opened the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. [3] a b c d "President defends Jose Saramago funeral no-show". BBC News. 21 June 2010 . Retrieved 21 June 2010. Saramago, José (1922–2010)". Encyclopedia of World Biography. Ed. Tracie Ratiner. Vol. 25. 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005. Discovering Collection. Thomson Gale. University of Guelph. 25 September 2007. Claraboya, novela inédita de Saramago, verá la luz". El País. 3 October 2011 . Retrieved 14 October 2011.

Langer, Adam (November–December 2002). "José Saramago: Prophet of Doom – Pessimism is our only hope. The gospel according to José Saramago". Book Magazine. Archived from the original on 31 October 2002 . Retrieved 20 June 2010. This also explains why his novels appear to become more and more “allegorical” as time goes by, especially after The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, published in 1991. From that moment on, something changed in Saramago’s work. The first time he himself alluded to the change was during a 1998 lecture in Turin, Italy, where he compared his literary work to a statue made of stone. Until The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, he said, he had been describing the surface of the statue. But since Blindness, he was trying to describe the material itself, to penetrate the interior of the stone, looking for what he thought to be essential, for what usually remains hidden. Honeycutt, Kirk (2008-05-18). "Film Review: Blindness". The Hollywood Reporter. Nielsen Company. Archived from the original on 2008-05-17 . Retrieved 2008-05-20. Meirelles screened Blindness privately for Saramago. When the film ended, Saramago was in tears, and said: "Fernando, I am as happy to have seen this movie as I was the day I finished the book." [47] Protests [ edit ] The José Saramago Foundation announced in October 2011 the publication of a so-called "lost novel" published as Skylight ( Claraboia in Portuguese). It was written in the 1950s and remained in the archive of a publisher to whom the manuscript had been sent. Saramago remained silent about the work up to his death. The book has been translated into several languages. [27] Style and themes [ edit ] Saramago at Teatro Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá in 2007Saramago, Jose (20 April 2002). "De las piedras de David a los tanques de Goliat". El País. In Spanish: "educados y formados en la idea de que cualquier sufrimiento que hayan infligido . . . a los demas ... siempre sera inferior a los que ellos padecieron en el Holocausto, los judios arañan sin cesar su herida para que no dejede sangrar, para hacerla incurable, y la muestran al mundo como una bandera." Saramago wrote a sequel to Blindness in 2004, titled Seeing ( Ensaio sobre a lucidez, literal English translation Essay on lucidity), which has also been translated into English. The sequel novel takes place in the same country featured in Blindness and features several of the same nameless characters.

Saramago suffered from leukemia. He died on 18 June 2010, aged 87, having spent the last few years of his life in Lanzarote, Spain. [23] His family said that he had breakfast and chatted with his wife and translator Pilar del Río on Friday morning, after which he started feeling unwell and died. [24] The Guardian described him as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation", [23] while Fernanda Eberstadt of The New York Times said he was "known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction". [5]There is, of course, a lot of scepticism and dystopian pessimism in Saramago’s work. In part, this has to do with a certain melancholy aspect of the Portuguese mentality. But it is also related to the fact that Saramago became a writer in a very difficult, even hostile, context: he began writing under a fascist regime; had no academic education; didn’t belong to the cultural, bourgeois elite; and found it difficult at times to make a living. All this surely contributed to his increasingly pessimistic character. Blindness ( Portuguese: Ensaio sobre a cegueira, meaning Essay on Blindness) is a 1995 novel by the Portuguese author José Saramago. It is one of Saramago's most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. In 1998, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Blindness was one of his works noted by the committee when announcing the award. [1] The film appeared on some critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008. Bill White of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer named it the 5th best film of 2008, [46] and Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle named it the 8th best film of 2008. [46] Awards and accolades [ edit ] After an uprising, folks find out the asylum has been abandoned by the army who was until then responsible for it and they’re able to leave. Realizing that what they went through in quarantine was only a detail in the huge landscape, now we follow our protagonists as they wander through the city in search of better conditions: water, food, clothes, a way to find their homes and their relatives.