Blindness.

SARAMAGO, Jose.

Item Number: 144

Orlando: Harcourt, Brace and Company , 1997.

First American edition of the author’s novel on the order of Camus’ The Plague. Octavo, original boards. Signed and dated by Jose Saramago. Near fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Claudine G. Mansour. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero.

The Portugese writer Jose Saramago is the recipient of both the 1995 Camões Prize and 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature. Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the greatest living novelist" and considers him to be "a permanent part of the Western canon (Evans, 2002). Blindness is "[a]bounding in the perseverance and hope (and absurdity and horror) of everyday lives, Blindness is of the ages: profound by being elemental. It's a major contribution to Saramago's oeuvre. May he live to 100. He has more books to write." (The Houston Chronicle). "Blindness is the darkest and most concentrated of Saramago's books. With a grim, sometimes monotonously repetitive accumulation of detail, he constructs what in some respects could be a circle of Dantean hell...." (Los Angeles Times Sunday). Blindness was adapted to film and was directed by Fernando Meirelles and starred Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo.