bookwormralpha

Great metaphor that doesn't get in the way of a great story by DougTidwell

A book by a Nobel prize winner I’d never heard of. A driver stopped at a red light suddenly goes blind. A stranger helps him home, but later steals his car. When the blind man’s wife gets home, she takes him to an Opthalmologist. By the next day, the car thief, the eye doctor, the blind man’s wife and several of the doctor’s patients are also blind. Over the next few days, the epidemic spreads, with the blind and those close to them (contaminated but not yet blind) quarantined in an abandoned mental hospital. When the government takes her husband away, the doctor’s wife has the presence of mind to pretend she is blind as well. As society falls apart, she is the only person in the entire quarantine (and, we find out later, the entire country) who doesn’t go blind. The struggle for decency as society collapses reminded of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. All in all, this is a very moving book whose central metaphor (physical blindness as a stand-in for moral blindness) never gets in the way of a compelling sto