Kundera In The East: A Life Across A Divide

Milan Kundera was born in Brno, in south Moravia, Czechoslovakia, now Czechia, in 1929. A committed Communist, he joined the party in 1947, shortly before enrolling at Charles University in Prague. A youthful indiscretion, apparently praising Trotsky, resulted in his exclusion from the Party in 1950, and he had to spend the remainder of his military service working in Czech coal mines.

During this time, Kundera also began work on his first two books, both poem collections, titled The Vast Garden of Man, and Last May. These garnered a positive reception, while critically not falling afoul of the Communist authorities. During the destalinisation programme of 1956, the Party rehabilitated Kundera, who gained much inspiration from the events of the following decade, and particularly the Prague Spring. He sang the praises of the independent Czech spirit in several works, like Miracle in Bohemia, The Pleasantry, and Laughable Loves, the latter two considered anti-totalitarian in outlook.

The Soviet invasion of 1968 – conducted with half a million men in arms, tanks, and a serious complement of artillery – put an end to unchecked freedom of expression in Czechoslovakia. In 1970, Kundera was again excluded from the Party, losing his teaching position in the Higher Institute for Film Studies, with the authorities going so far as to purge the libraries of his books. Having obtained a two-year visa to France, he left Czechoslovakia by car with his wife in 1975. Continuing literary success allowed him to stay in France, motivated by the jeopardy his continued existence in Czechoslovakia placed on his friends and all those who had assisted him in any way.

Kundera In The West: Bridging The Divide

Kundera’s stay in France allowed him to rise from merely national to continental relevance. Writing first in Czech and then in French, as well as receiving several important French literary prizes, he rapidly established himself as one of the most widely known writers of the period, from the late 1970s until the fall of Communism in 1989.

Kundera was first and foremost an avant-garde writer, exploring human sexuality and the evolution of gender relations in an environment where the women’s liberation movement was taking its first decisive steps forward. His position straddling East and West fascinated his newfound Western audience. He was – and remains today – an intellectual writer, heavy with reflections on the meaning of things, citing Nietzche and Ionesco, analysing his characters’ motives and feelings. But is he really an East or even Central European writer, aside from his geographic affiliation?

Reservations Of His Countrymen

Kundera was and still is a popular author in the West, and his work has been translated into many languages. In his own Czechia, this appears to not be the case. Aside from the question of how atypical a Central European writer Kundera is, there is one incident that goes a long way to explain his compatriots’ lack of interest in his literary production.

In 2008, a document emerged from a local police department. Dated 1950, the document detailed how Milan Kundera had denounced a fellow soldier, Miroslav Dvořáček, to the police. The accusation was one of desertion, accompanied by the presentation of false papers. Whether the accusation truly originated with Kundera or with someone else, the authorities’ investigation resulted in a long prison sentence for Dvořáček.

To this day, Kundera vehemently denies having made any such statement, or even knowing the man personally. At the time the documents surfaced, police forgeries were known to be used as a political tool to bring down individuals the government did not like. Kundera would be a big name to take down, and international personalities rallied to his defence. Whether or not Kundera had done this in his youth is not definitely known. What role the incident should play in judging the man and his literature is another question. Even before the accusation, Czech readers seemed to have some reservations about him and his work.

Is Kundera’s lack of wide following in the Czech Republic an indication that the writer has left his roots behind? Without having some intimate knowledge of the Communist period first-hand, or access to anecdotes from the generations involved, it’s difficult to venture an opinion – even more so when his Czech works have seen less attention than those he produced in the West.

There are reasons, however, to think this might be the case, as unusual as it might be. Czech and Eastern European readers will chafe at the Marxist label petite bourgeoisie in art, and yet there are many bourgeois elements in Kundera’s work that seem to transcend his upbringing or harken back to another time. His psychological understanding of human behaviour is profound and occupies the main focus of his work. Yet though he talks of couples, threesomes, sexual and romantic attractions, hardly any families figure in Kundera’s work. Society would not ‘reproduce’, to use a near-Marxist term, without families.

His characters live, like all bourgeois characters in similar microscopic dissections, in a world of sexual impulses, devoid of thoughts or even a word about contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, or abortion. And of course, nobody really works very much in his novels and stories. The focus lies entirely with their emotional life, suspended beyond any material considerations. Early in his life, Kundera had criticized ‘social realism’. It is clear he didn’t like it. Yet, still with all this, Milan Kundera is a marvellous and insightful writer. The only question that remains is if there is a Central European Czech writer named Milan Kundera, or only a French writer in the making.

Why Read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting gives the reader ample occasion to judge Kundera’s vocation as a writer. The English translation by Aaron Asher for Harper is very readable, and available in paperback. Written late in his life while in France, there are in this collection of short stories many which deal with the period when Kundera still lived in Czechoslovakia under communist rule. They are seen through the lens of memory – another main theme in his works – of a man, now successful and living in the West. Yet much of his early experience remains.

Other stories explore gender relationships. These are more typical of his vocation as an avant-garde writer of contemporary mores. Here, like Nabokov, the sharp incisive knife of his pen dissects the characters’ motives. The writing is clear, without excess; the human drama is seen in a world in which God has been dead for a long time. But other things have died and been buried for this post-modernist. Whether looking at Kundera’s communists, unrelentingly bad, or his heroes and heroines, unrelentingly coupling, Kundera’s experience of communism has led him to replace the political project with the mundane. Life is the sum of its daily sorrows and joys. All projects have long ago been defeated and forgotten.

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England, like the rest of Europe, has changed enormously since that time. Europe itself is happily learning to put all these national and class conceits behind, although some think they can now turn them towards third world immigrants. Despite those anticipated changes, writers like George Orwell stand above their époque leading us by example into a future few could see at the time.

The Engaged Writer

Writers since the time of the Greeks and Romans have addressed governing the polis as an integral part of their art and vocation. During the Middle Ages, Dante and Machiavelli continued these traditions. In France, Voltaire, Rousseau and d’Alembert prepared the path for Chamfort, Mirabeau, then Zola and Hugo. Schiller and Heine played similar roles in German literature.

In the wake of World War II and the flowering of philosophical thought in Europe, the old was shed in a search for new social paradigms. The ‘engaged writer’ became a thing in contemporary parlance with the existential philosophy of Sartre, though writers had often embraced social activism before. This now articulated existential posture was embodied in the writing and social action of Camus and his contemporaries.

In a world governed by existence, the writer was no longer assigned his or her place in society by fate or religion; but chose it. The ‘nothing’ inside Sartre’s seminal work Being and Nothingness allowed man to create his existence and its meaning from whole cloth. Few were better suited to do this than the writer who combined intellect with action.

Enter Eric Blair

Much of the reversal of values finding its expression in philosophy and literature was created by the war – in fact, two World Wars – as well as an intervening pandemic and economic depression. It is not surprising then to find engaged writers preceding by a few years Sartre’s discovery of them. Such a writer was George Orwell, born Eric Blair. Similar engagement characterised many others, both in the pre and post-war period. Had the challenges of the time solicited such an ardent response?

For Eric Blair, who had come from Burmese service, the path to writing was different than that of his aristocrat peers. From little England and a scholarship to Eton to run off to Paris, joining the anarchists to fight in Spain’s civil war, and even writing and organising for the British Labour Party, his accomplishments are a heroic feat for his time and class.

Upbringing and Background

Eric Blair was born in Burma the son of an ennobled bourgeois family who had lost their fortune and found their way to a middle-class existence through the sinecure of foreign service. Eric was too young to know Burma when he returned to England with his mother and sister to await their father’s retirement shortly before the birth of a younger sister.

To understand Eric, or more particularly what he refused to become, it is necessary to understand the rigid class system of the period. The system in its current form dates from the Normans. The Normans used their newfound power in invasion and defeat of the English at Hastings in 1066 to rule over the English nobility. The English were relegated to the status of minor nobility with circumspect local powers. Status was guarded jealousy.

The Normand-English now allied with the royal houses of Europe were at the pinnacle of the hierarchy; English dukes, counts and minor nobles ruled locally at their pleasure. Unlike on the continent, the English yeoman was nearly completely alienated from his ultimate rulers. For a time after the invasion, the Normans spoke French obliging the lower nobility to get on as they could linguistically. Latin was the second language of the educated, ahead of Anglo-Saxon English.

Even today, the multiplicity of class accents reflects these divisions. Ennoblement was a distinction meant to keep the system functioning and turn successful local functionaries into allies and members of the establishment. The boarding school system, itself separated into hierarchical tiers, reinforced the power of the upper classes through education.

The Boarding School System: Orwell’s Education

Eric Blair’s status put him at the bottom rungs of this system, though well above the toiling class. His family’s finances made climbing those rungs difficult. But he was fortunate in several ways and also enterprising. His studies paved the way for a partial scholarship. Both the first World War, which emptied the school dormitories of future officers for the front and his own success on the two and a half-day entry exam enabled Eric to obtain a place and scholarship to Eton at the upper limit of his class aspirations.

The boarding school system, especially his preparatory school Saint Cyprian’s, was a brutal and lonely experience that stunted the growth of many Englishman from Oscar Wilde to C.S. Lewis when it wasn’t producing hardened officers for the Empire. Orwell’s uniqueness began here as he did not accept the unreasonable demands of what C.S. Lewis, George Monbiot and Virginia Woolf call an ‘English pathology’. His own scathing critique of the school in Such, Such Were The Joys was so unique and disturbing at the time that it was rarely read and hardly republished.

A friend and fellow Saint Cyprian, Cyril Connolly, one of the few to also reject his school experience, writes of Eric (now George): “The remarkable thing about Orwell was that he alone among the boys was an intellectual and not a parrot, for he thought for himself, read Shaw and Samuel Butler, and rejected not only [St. Cyprian’s] but the war, the Empire, Kipling, Success and Character”. A false sense of ‘Success and Character’ was the principal mantra of the school’s education according to Connolly, and undoubtedly Orwell as well.

Early Reflections of George Orwell

Orwell’s rejection of the war in 1918 as a ‘meaningless slaughter’ was not yet cemented in stone. This would come later as he was still prone to youthful moments of patriotism. No longer working as hard at Eton he would not present himself for a scholarship to Oxford. That would end his schooling, a bourse a ‘sine qua non’ given family finances for university. This was hardly uncommon for the period, even for an Etonian.

It was the exam for the Imperial Police that he presented instead. Successfully competing, he received a posting to Burma where his ideas on imperialism, war and socialism would take further shape. The education, as inadequate as Orwell considered it, for he was a voracious reader beyond the confines of his courses, gave him a humanitarian culture and confidence. Experience of the world gave him material for reflection. He was fast becoming an engaged writer, a democratic socialist and humanist. In the eyes of the governing half of England though, he was, if not entirely a traitor to his class, on the margins of ‘acceptable’ behaviour’.

Spain and World War II

In 1936, Orwell left a grocery store that he had started with his wife to volunteer to fight with the anarchists and Trotskyites in Spain, After 115 days fighting on the Aragon front, he returned to England – not without a souvenir, having experienced a bullet to the neck and partial paralysis of the right arm and loss of his voice. Home, in England he found the Spanish Civil War had resolved nothing in Europe’s march to a continent-wide conflagration. Shortly thereafter, he captured his experience of the civil war in Homage To Catalonia, a book criticized both by the British Tory establishment and Labour which was decidedly pro-Moscow and anti-Trotskyite and anarchist.

Orwell was not surprised. The allies had let the fascists triumph in Spain next door while making all sorts of noise about Munich and the Sudetenland in the inaccessible heart of Europe. They would not have been able to stop Hitler there even if they had wanted to. Nearby Spain might well have been another story. The machinations of the communists too were clear to him.

Post-War

World War II had been anticipated by Orwell’s My Country Right or Left. Orwell was, when all was said and done despite his reservations, a patriot. Hitler had to be defeated. He still held out hope that all the killing might result in some sort of revolutionary moment, improving the conditions of the working class once and for all.

He tried in various ways to make himself useful to the war effort, including enlisting, but his tuberculosis always got in the way. Furthermore, he wrote for numerous publications, his insights becoming increasingly recognized as political reporting of the first order. Eventually, he was signed up as a program broadcaster for the BBC Far Eastern service, something between reporting and propaganda, which he was more than willing to do.

Major Works of George Orwell

George Orwell died in 1950 at the age of 46 from tuberculosis, which plagued him all his life and caused him to have several serious bouts of pneumonia. In spite of this, he led an active life and was a very prolific writer. He is survived by his adopted son with his first wife Eileen.

We can add to the works already cited, Wigan’s Pier, his tribute to the coal miners and the working class of northern England, written shortly before the war. His major works, Animal Farm and 1984 came after the war and are classics of world literature. The latter, written while he was ill from Tuberculosis, has given its name to regimes of dystopian tyranny, especially ‘Newspeak’, the invented language of the totalitarian state.

Reading Orwell has been somewhat distorted by the success of these major works. They are truly brilliant and classical works of world literature but they have themselves become tools of the propaganda he detested. These two books were used to portray Orwell as an anti-communist and defender of liberal capitalism. The former he was, though not religiously, his socialism leaned toward the Trotskyite, the latter he certainly was not.

Why Should You Read Orwell?

Today’s Europe was formed through two World Wars, the struggle between fascism, capitalism, communism and decolonization. Orwell was present at the forefront of these events as a journalist and writer. His keen eye of observer, lucid intelligence, experience and emphasis on clear expository writing makes him indispensable for understanding Europe’s formative years. Read and appreciated by both left and right, he cuts through much of the dross of ideologies to understand the fate of man in this tumultuous period.

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Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life

Ryszard Kapuściński was born on March 4, 1932, in Pinsk, which at the time was part of Poland. After the Soviet occupation of the city in 1939, his family, fearing deportation for being Polish, moved to Otwock, near Warsaw.

His family was not rich, nor did he have any notable relatives. His life wasn’t much different from that of other young Poles under the communist regime of the Polish People’s Republic. That is, until he started working as a journalist in 1950. When he began working as a reporter for the Sztandar Mlodych, a youth-targeted pro-Soviet newspaper, and later for the Polish Press Agency, little did he know that it would be the start of nearly thirty years of adventures around the world.

It was during these travels that Kapuściński witnessed the transformation of the world during the Cold War: the African decolonization and its coups and civil wars, the Iranian Revolution, and the political crisis in South American countries. Once he came back to Poland, he lived long enough to see his country struggling to overthrow the communist regime. He then also witnessed the transition to democracy and the accession to the European Union. He died on January 23, 2007.

Another Day of Life

In Another Day of Life, Kapuściński recounts his life during the autumn of 1975 in Angola. That was the year when, after a long and bloody war, the African state gained independence. With its newfound independence,  Angola nevertheless struggled with its identity. Another war was raging, soured by the departure of Portuguese troops and people: that between Angolan communists and anti-communists.

On one side, there was the left-leaning MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola). The MPLA was in charge of negotiating the independence of the country and wanted to assure it a socialist-leaning structure. On the other, the UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) and FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) were against the creation of a People’s Republic. The struggle was clearly one of the proxy wars between the global Western and Eastern blocks at the time. It is no surprise, then, that direct support was given to the two factions by Cuba and South Africa.

After describing the miserable state of Luanda, the capital of Angola, as Portuguese settlers left the city and hostile forces started to siege the suburbs, Kapuściński travelled to the front line. There he witnessed the apparently unstoppable advance of anti-communist forces and armoured South-African formations, all while escaping death on several occasion. The end of the conflict came when Cuban soldiers and supplies arrived from across the Atlantic, bringing balance to the conflict. This allowed the first president of Angola, MPLA’s Agostinho Neto, to officially declare independence on November 11, 1975.

In 2018, an animated movie of the same name – quite faithfully based on this book – was made.

Why should you read it?

Why should Europeans care about a book which talks about Angola, an African country? Well, because it’s not just a report about Angola, and the struggle for Angolan independence is not just about Africa.

Kapuściński offers a window into what 1975 meant to the Portuguese people of Angola in all strata of society. Not only rich retailers and shop owners, but also middle-class workers and farmers. They were all forced to abandon their homes, fearing persecution. Almost 300,000 civilians left the former colony, with most of them going to the Portuguese mainland. Along with other expatriates, mainly from Mozambique, their sudden arrival created a huge problem in accommodating and employing them. They were known as the retornados. But a few remained, fighting alongside the MPLA. That’s the case of commander Farrusco, who the author met on the frontline in the south of the country.

So, Another Day in Life is also about the relations between Africa and Europe. It’s part of both African and European identities, regardless of what certain nationalist theories would like to propose.

And it’s not even just that. The book’s structure is divided between the author narrating his experience and his dispatches to the Polish Press Agency. This gives us an idea of what it meant to be the only Polish reporter in Africa at the time: being white, European, and from the socialist sphere. Risking his life at checkpoints, struggling with poor financial resources, but nonetheless carrying on with his work.

Thanks to its autobiographic nature, it is possible to read this book through the lens of multiple approaches, all precious. As a basis to learn about a historical period and its society. Being the subject of a case study on journalistic reports. As an adventurous tale. Or maybe, through an interdisciplinary approach blending all these together.

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European literature, in this regard, is particularly varied. Every country – every region – has its own defined characteristics, ones which comprise the cultural baggage which people from that country have rooted within them. Analysing European literature in all of its traits and idiosyncrasies is the best way to truly soak in what Pierre Bourdieu called the habitus: each country’s cultural capital, the deeply ingrained habits and skills of its people, and the dispositions which they possess due to their life experiences within that culture. In short, reading a country’s literature allows you to understand its people.

There are some books which manage to capture that, and as such, have become classics of national and European literature. Czech author Hašek’s “The Good Soldier Švejk” is one of them.

Jaroslav Hašek: A Life

Jaroslav Hašek was born on April 30, 1883, in Prague, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bohemia, as the region was then known, was part of the Austrian half of the Empire, with German playing a major role in culture and administration.  The author’s grandfather, František Hašek, had participated in the Prague Uprising of 1848, and later went on to become a member of the Austrian Parliament in Kroměříž, Moravia.

In his youth, Jaroslav Hašek was expelled from school at the age of fifteen for bad behaviour, but swiftly recovered from the setback. He found employment mixing drugs for a pharmacist and then studied business, graduating with honors. He then became a bank clerk, but quit after an episode in which he refused to run an errand in order to spend time at the pub. Thereafter, he supported himself by selling dogs – a profession shared by his stories’ main character, Švejk.

Hašek was an anarchist, and often found himself arrested for unruly behaviour, including vandalism or assaulting a police officer. He fought in the First World War, and was captured in Russia in 1915, being then sent to a camp for prisoners of war, where he served as a commander’s secretary. In 1916 he joined the Czech Legion, a military unit of Czech nationals that switched sides and fought for the Entente against the Central Powers. When Russia descended into revolution, Hašek joined the Bolsheviks’ fledging Red Army. During his revolutionary military service, he became a bigamist, wedding a second wife.

During his time in Russia, Hašek was mistakenly reported dead at home. Upon returning to Prague in 1920, he wrote an article called “How I Met the Author of My Obituary”. He started writing the Švejk stories after this, but he was unable to finish them before he died of tuberculosis, caught during the war. He was 39 years old at the time.

The Good Soldier Švejk

The Good Soldier Švejk is a collection of satirical, dark humor adventure stories, detailing the farcical vicissitudes of the titular soldier, as well as his dealings with incompetent authority figures.
Hašek originally intended the Švejk stories to be published in a total of six volumes, but only three were completed, and a fourth begun, before his untimely death. Among the works of Czech literature, this is the most translated and appreciated internationally, with an unexpected impact on popular culture. American author Joseph Heller has said that he would have never written his most famous novel, Catch 22, if he had not read Švejk first.

The author’s own biography plays an important role in the story. The protagonist’s adventures start off at the beginning of the First World War and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Švejk is a humble, good humoured, rheumatic dog seller who gets arrested for predicting that a war will break out because of the assassination. After various, increasingly absurd adventures in prison and in a mental institution, he is conscripted into the army. The rest of the stories follow Švejk’s military life.

While the events of the book vary from grotesque to humorous, never during the entire collection is there a description of a battle. All the events of the book are about the daily routine of life at the front, as well as the functioning of the multicultural, multi-language armed forces of the Empire. The few deaths that impact the character happen off screen, and are mentioned only in passing. Švejk speaks German well enough to be picked as an orderly, first to a camp priest, and then to an officer. Upon falling into Russian captivity he uses his German knowledge to work in an office.

The novel underlines the hypocrisy and incompetence of the aristocracy, as well as the unfair and humiliating hierarchy of the armed forces in the stories. The book also contains strong criticism of the clergy. The priest who initially makes use of the protagonist’s services is an alcoholic and a gambler, and loses Švejk’s services to the officer by betting them during a game of cards. The officer in question, Lieutenant Lukáš, actually appreciates Švejk’s loyalty and ingenuity, but after a few mishaps is glad to be rid of him. Švejk himself  is presented as naive, if good natured character, but by the end he seems to solve every situation in the most absurd and convoluted way possible, usually while getting his direct superiors into trouble.

Why should you read it?

Through their good-spirited humour, the Švejk stories are a powerful anti-war piece. The tales might be humorous throughout, but the situation in which the main character is thrust is always acutely tragic. The patriotic feelings present at the beginning of the story are slowly phased out and replaced with the descriptions of the hardships of military life.

Humour is the indispensable coping mechanism that allows soldiers to deal with their hardships. Read in their entirety (as far as the author could complete them), Švejk’s adventures are a good prompt to reflect on the values of patriotism, the price of war and human dignity. They are also a good reflection of the spirit of eastern-European thinking and cleverness as a way to overcome hardship.

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European literature, in this regard, is particularly varied. Every country – every region – has its own defined characteristics, ones which comprise the cultural baggage which people from that country have rooted within them. Analysing European literature in all of its traits and idiosyncrasies is the best way to truly soak in what Pierre Bourdieu called the habitus: each country’s cultural capital, the deeply ingrained habits and skills of its people, and the dispositions which they possess due to their life experiences within that culture. In short, reading a country’s literature allows you to understand its people.

There are some books which manage to capture that, and as such, have become classics of national and European literature. For this month’s pick, we look at Portugal!

Recommended

Blindness by José Saramago.

The author: José de Sousa Saramago (1922 – 2010) is one of Portugal’s most famous writers, and has been referred to by one critic as “a permanent part of the Western canon”. He was the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, and his works have been translated into twenty-five languages. Although he was a self identified atheist, his works often use religious topics and contain theopoetic elements. He has been criticised by the Catholic church on numerous occasions; especially for his novels, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and Cain.

Saramago was a proponent of anarcho-communism, and a member of the Communist Party of Portugal, as well as a supporter of Iberian federalism. In 2007 he founded the José Saramago Foundation with the aim of defending and popularising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Portuguese culture, and the protection of the environment.

The book: Blindness is true to its title, detailing the outbreak of a mysterious epidemic of blindness in an unspecified city, and describing the subsequent collapse of society, as well as the marred lives of the stricken protagonists. It is a story about the dark side of human nature, and what happens when the rules of society are no longer upheld or enforced.  Whilst dark, dystopic books about the end of the world have been written before, Blindness is unique in the way it tells the story.
It is not identified, not even hinted at, when and where this white blindness epidemic takes place. There are no specifics on communication methods, no landmarks, no references to famous people, or any aspect of culture. Save for essential infrastructure, like supermarkets, there is no setting element for the reader something to grab on to, to connect this with any location, or time in history.
This gives the novel a very unsettling tone, because it gives the feeling that it could happen at any time, anywhere and to anyone.

The Plot (spoilers ahead): in an unnamed city, a mysterious disease strikes first one unnamed doctor, then several of his patiens, moving on to everyone they have come in contact with, and slowly spreads to the entire population. The doctor’s wife is the only person who is spared from the disease, but she fakes blindness so as not to be separated from her husband. Typically for Saramago, all the characters remain anonymous throughout the novel, and are only identified by some personal trait, or more often by their relationship with the other characters.

In the first stage of the epidemic a quarantine is set up, and the first few dozen infected are isolated. The doctor’s wife is the only inmate who still has her sight. This is where the book switches from mystery to the erosion of society. At first, the victims are still disoriented and trust in the better judgment of the authorities, so they go along with everything that they are subjected to. But because the disease is spreading at exponential rate the government just cannot control the situation. Anxiety over the increasingly haphazard food supply grows rampant as the logistics that allow the functioning of modern society fall apart.

As more and more people are put into the quarantine area, a new, harsh social structure emerges within the walls of the hospital, with wardens withholding food and subjecting the inmates to violence. Eventually, all hell breaks lose and the blind fight each other, resulting in violence and murder. The patients eventually revolt and break out from the confines of the hospital, with the doctor’s wife serving as caretaker for a core group of survivors.
Once outside, the escapees find that society no longer exists. Everyone is blind, unable to find their family and friends, chiefly preoccupied with securing food and surviving. And then, the disease starts to disappear, without prior warning. There is no comfortable resolution at the end. The epidemic is left unexplained, and readers are left to their own means to interpret the story.

Why we recommend it: Blindness terrifies the reader with its intense and dark depiction of society, but it also gives a glimpse into what is wonderful about the human experience. Love, kindness, solidarity and courage. These are all present at the same time, in a cruel new world where no one really knows how to do things right. The authorities are powerless, other people are dangerous, the only thing that protects the individual is their group, their chosen family. In the end, all the characters have is each other.
It is not a book for the faint of heart, with some of the scenes being deeply disturbing. But it is a story that makes you think and ask the deepest of moral questions. How much are we shaped by the comfortable, well regulated social context we live in? And how much is it up to the person to decide what is right and what is wrong? The book does not moralise. It just presents this story and leaves it to the reader to answer the question of what they would do in the inhumane situation described.

Other recommended literature from Portugal

Portugal is a country with a rich history of literary masterpieces! Should you wish to explore this tradition, here is a quick list to get you started.

Recommended books from Portugal:
A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening (Um Deus Passeando Pela Brisa da Tarde) by Mario de Carvalho.
The Sin of Father Amaro (O Crime do Padre Amaro) by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz.
The Maias (Os Maias) by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz.

Recommended authors from Portugal:
Aquilino Ribeiro
Miguel Torga
Cesario Verde
Antero de Quental
Almeida Garrett

Recommended poetry from Portugal:
Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads) by Luís Vaz de Camões.
The works of Fernando Pessoa.

Did you enjoy this article? You might like The Ode To Joy: Five Key Facts About Our Common Anthem and The Wall: a European Album that Warns Us Against our Inner Nazi Dictator

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