Blindness by Jose Saramago

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are, said the doctor. And what about people, asked the girl with the dark glasses, People, too, no one will be there to see them...

A man is stopped in his car at a red light when his vision goes suddenly white. A good samaritan slips in the driver's seat and takes him home, but instead of parking his car nearby, he decides on the spur of the moment to steal it, only to go blind himself moments later. The first blind man goes to see an ophthalmologist, who is baffled by the condition--and then he, too, goes blind. Soon dozens are stricken by the "white sickness," and the government panics. The doctor, the first blind man, the car thief, and several others--all of whom remain identified in this way, without names--are quarantined in a dilapidated mental hospital where they are guarded by armed soldiers but otherwise left to fend for themselves.

I didn't really think about the fact that Blindness, like Pale Horse, Pale Rider and The Plague, is a piece of plague literature. It captures something true about our own pandemic even better than those other books: the way contagion makes other people objects of fear and hatred, and how this fact threatens the stability of social bonds. The second man to go blind was first charitable, then predatory; his blindness is the result of his interaction with the first blind man but it cannot be said that he went blind because he treated him kindly or cruelly. A pandemic, as we know all too well, complicates our understanding of good and evil, and how link these to causality:

It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves and ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim this is the much-talked-of immortality. Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried.

Blindness is as chilling a dystopian novel as I've ever read. The conditions under which the blind are quarantined are remarkably vile: food is dropped off in a distant hallway and left to the blind to retrieve and distribute; hygiene and medical care are not provided; the stumbling blind are shot indiscriminately by terrified soldiers; they must bury their own dead--how?--and they are told that, in the case of a fire, their lives will not be saved. You might call that last one Chekhov's match. It's sort of funny in the year 2021 to think of the government taking a pandemic this seriously, but the "plan" seems to be to put a bottle on the problem and hope it goes away. Yet there is no severing the ties that bind people, another lesson we learned well when supply chains began to fail and essential workers bore the brunt of our fear in the spring of 2020.

The quarantined are essentially left to starve and die in their own literal filth. (For obvious reasons, the quarters begin to fill with human excrement.) A gang of thugs manages to sneak in a gun and command the distribution of food; when valuables run out they demand to be paid in rape. To show this, Saramago makes a clever choice: he lets one character see, the doctor's wife, who has lied and claimed that she has gone blind in order to stay with her husband. She becomes, to the extent that she can, a kind of seeing angel, guiding the small band of protagonists through the horrible gauntlet of blindness and squalor. When the hospital burns down, she is the one who guides the survivors through the harrowing landscape of a world in which everyone has gone blind.

Blindness is an antidote to the idea that a book can't be both literary and have a thrilling plot. I never believed that, but a bunch of Young Adult fans on Twitter seem to think so. I was fascinated by Saramago's style, which does away with sentence breaks and punctuation in favor of long run-on sentences governed by commas. It's frenetic and effective, though I suspect it should not be tried at home, and does a good job in this book at least of capturing the sense of chaos in which the newly blind find themselves.

Postscript: One of my new goals is to be better about reading international literature. I recently tallied up the number of countries from which I can say I have read at least one writer, and while I think I probably have done better than most, there are so many holes in my reading history. Saramago is officially the first Portuguese author I've read, so that's one more for the list!

Severance by Ling Ma

Memories beget memories. Shen Fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember, too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop. We drive, we sleep, we drive some more.

A mysterious disease emerges from China. The U.S. border is shut down, but it's too late: the infection spreads uncontrollably. Things in China are even worse, we suspect, but the Chinese government keeps a tight lid on information coming out of the country. Americans try to protect themselves with mask, though not everyone believes they provide any protection at all. Basic services begin to fail; the supply chain buckles; people flee New York as it begins to collapse. Those who stay attempt to work from home, but without the interconnectedness of the modern world, things go quickly south.

In 2021, Ling Ma's Severance seems awfully prescient, doesn't it? What stands out the most is perhaps the ways in which Ma's imagination falls short of the real thing: the number of dead, for example, that provokes the U.S. to stop publishing statistics, is 280,000. (We're at 600,000 and counting.) The main character's employer offers a colossal sum to continue working from the office while everyone else transitions to remote work. This last bit seems particularly egregious, given how interested Severance is in the economic structures that seem both so fragile and so binding: of course, in the real world, many people have simply been forced into work. But these are not really criticisms, just grimly funny observations; in truth Severance seems to have gotten the shape and import of a 21st century global pandemic exactly right.

The protagonist, Candace Chen, is a Chinese-born American who, in her former life, works as a production director for a book publisher. Her job is in Bibles: sourcing the leather, the paper, the little gemstones attached to their most expensive product line. This work involves contracting Chinese companies; she travels between America and Shenzen and gives her a first-hand look at the realities of the global manufacturing economy. This job is exactly as fulfilling as you expect it might be, and she drifts through her New York existence in profound alienation: the second meaning of the word severance, and a state that the pandemic only intensifies. After the "Shen Fever" hits, she escapes the city, only to be captured by the megalomaniac leader of a group of travelers who sees her pregnancy as link to the future existence of humankind.

What I liked most about Severance is that it doesn't overexplain the connections between Candace's pre-pandemic profession and the reality of social collapse. Shen Fever, unlike Covid, is a fungal disease, and though it's not explicitly stated, one suspects that it travels around the world on the billions of products with MADE IN CHINA inscribed on them. Candace's own relationship to China, a country where all of her surviving family lives, but about which she remembers little, is a fraught one, circumscribed, like most Americans, by the logic of economics and production, rather than affection. "The future just wants more consumers," her boyfriend tells her, but Severance is a story about a future that consumes itself to death and is unable to stop. Sufferers of Shen Fever can often be discovered in zombie-like reenactments of what they loved most in life, and often this becomes acts of empty consumption: trying on clothes, walking around an abandoned mall. Severance describes a world in which production and consumption govern our most intimate and far-flung relationships, and suggests that the most frightening thing about those relationships somehow is the possibility of their collapse.