Plot: A mysterious blindness strikes an unnamed city, and the government attempts to respond before social order crumbles. A temporary "quarantine" area is created as a protective measure and the book follows a variety of narrators afflicted with the blindness.
In-progress Review: I'm approximately half-way through this apocalyptic novel. It is written in a peculiar style (no names, no quotation marks, few paragraph breaks) which seems to accentuate the "blind" feeling of the novel's protagonists. Saramago blinds the reader, just as the characters themselves are blind to the differentiating characteristics of the world. It is one of the few novels of this genre that focuses on the "afflicted" (but then again, this is also one of the few novels that does not involve a fatal or prima facie de-humanizing disease- ex: zombie epidemic- so that makes it far easier to have characters who can be "full" characters), and that places the narration in a far more interesting place than other novels. This also seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it novel (some friends have liked it, others have not, mostly due to the style of the writing). Another interesting thing to note is that original title is "Ensaio sobre a cegueira" which means "Essay on blindness" (somewhat innocuous, eh? Which makes the contents all the more chilling.).