Blindness
A plague of "white blindness" strikes a city. The social order collapses. One woman who can still see must lead her husband and the blind through the catastrophe. Saramago uses SF's disaster scenario to strip civilization to its brutal foundations.
The run-on sentences and missing punctuation flatten dialogue until it “faded quickly into a drab monotone,” and readers argue over whether the translation or the original is to blame. A pointed criticism holds the women function as symbols of hope and compassion rather than as people, a “creepy old-timey view of women” in which “even atheist communists have trouble leaving the Madonna/Whore binary behind.” Disability-studies readers say the premise “belittles the lived experience of disabled people,” using a real disability as a stand-in for moral collapse. And the shape readers report is riveting, then a long middle that loses them, then riveting again.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
