Sunday, April 5, 2009

Blindness

I just finished reading Blindness by Jose Saramago. Amazing book. Although I did it backwards. I saw the movie first (imagine me hiding under a chair in embarrassment here). I have to admit, the movie was incredibly true to the book and I think I liked it better than the book. It may have been the writing style. It was kind of free flowing, no paragraph breaks or quotation marks to break up the dialogue at all so I really had to pay attention to understand who was saying what.

But the thing that was most interesting to me is that no character had a proper name. It was "the doctor", "the first blind man", "the girl with the dark glasses", because when everyone is blind, names aren't important anymore.

So if you haven't read the book, I suggest that you do so. And if you have, put it in your netflix queue. Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo are both amazing, but especially Julianne Moore. Can she act badly? I don't think so.

1 comment:

Natalie said...

Oh I tried to read this book a few years ago. I got about a third of the way through and felt like I was in "The Lord of the Flies" and couldn't finish it. I agree though that it may have been the writing style.