Thoughts on the Book Blindness

Reading Time: 2 minutes
I read Blindness last month and finished it yesterday and although it won a Nobel Prize I was not a fan of the book. I haven't had time to digest it properly yet but I think that it was at a disadvantage.

It explores what it would be like to live through an epidemic, but we have all been through a global pandemic now. The ideas and concepts of this book, are thus theory, rather than life experiences that we have all had.

At first I thought "I would hate to go blind while at a traffic light and I think it would be hard" but then everyone is quarantined, which makes sense, before the entire world or at least region goes blind.

It's a strange book, in my eyes because it doesn't really explore how we adapt to losing sight. It assumes that we would revert to primitive habits, rather than adapt, and preserve certain values. I don't know whether to spoil the book or just explore ideas.

I really think that it should have explored the change in noise, as planes, cars and trains stopped moving around. If everyone goes blind then nature and perception would evolve and change accordingly.

We hear of the guards and soldiers but we don't hear much about them. That's why I think this book has a lot of "so what" moments. We're told something but it's left up to us to intuit the significance and relevance.

I suspect that this book also affected my emotional well being. It's not often that I want to stop reading a book, three quarters of the way through. I think that reading it today reminds us of the real pandemic. Reading it until 2019 would have been a theoretical concept. Now it's vécu, tu use the French word. It's experienced.

I think that within three hours to two weeks of reading the book it is hard to appreciate it, but that in a month or two I will appreciate it properly.

Some books have an impact once we have had time to digest the ideas.