Blindness by José Saramago

Gut-wrenching account of a contagion apocalypse

Portuguese author José Saramago won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of the works the prize committee singled out when announcing his award was his 1995 novel Blindness. I had previously read Saramago’s novel The Cave, which I wasn’t too crazy about. Blindness is a better-known and highly regarded book, however, so I decided to give Saramago a second try. I’m glad I did, because I was blown away by this book from page one. The most surprising thing about the novel, to me, is that it’s actually a kind of thriller, something one doesn’t expect from Nobel laureates.

At a busy intersection in an unnamed city, a car comes to a stop at a red light. When the light turns green, the car doesn’t move, causing a traffic jam. The reason for the car’s immobility is that the driver has suddenly and inexplicably gone blind. One of the bystanders on the scene gives the blind man a ride home, and later the blind man’s wife takes him to see an ophthalmologist who can find no cause for the sudden loss of sight. Soon, the bystander, the wife, and the doctor have all gone blind, indicating that this blindness is caused by a swiftly spreading contagion. When the authorities are notified of the outbreak, the first several victims and those who have come in contact with them are rounded up and quarantined. A former mental hospital is converted into a sanitarium, but in reality it is more of a concentration camp. The internees receive periodic disbursements of food and water, but are otherwise left to care for and govern themselves. Any who attempt to escape will be shot on sight by military guards who are terrified of catching the blindness disease.

This novel isn’t so much about blindness as it is about what happens to people when they are subjected to such extreme circumstances. Somewhat like a Holocaust novel, the story is an examination in how low humanity can be degraded while still remaining human. All of the characters in the book are nameless—the doctor, the first blind man, the girl with the dark glasses, the old man with the eyepatch, etc.—which adds to the feeling of inhumanity and loss of identity. The tone and effect of Blindness is quite similar to that of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. On the one hand, you are riveted to the story, and you admire the author for writing such a perfectly compelling narrative. On the other hand, you’re disgusted and repulsed by much of what you’re reading. One can’t help but acknowledge, however, that in an extreme apocalyptic situation such as this, there would be oppression and atrocities, violence, murders, rapes, filth, and degradation. This hell through which Saramago guides the reader is not a pleasant experience, but it is an experience that rings true to the reality of human nature as we unfortunately know it.

To be honest, the ending of Blindness wasn’t all I hoped it would be, but I was so impressed by the entire novel up to that point that I’m willing to overlook that imperfection and praise the whole work. After reading this novel, I really want to explore more of Saramago’s work, in particular his 2004 novel Seeing, which is a sequel to Blindness. For anyone interested in Saramago’s work, I would recommend buying The Collected Novels of José Saramago ebook volume from Open Road Media, which contains 13 novels and usually sells for under five bucks.

Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard

Crime caper in the Spanish-American War

Elmore Leonard got his start writing Westerns back in the 1950s and eventually became one of America’s bestselling authors in the genre of crime fiction. His 1998 book Cuba Libre, a historical novel set during the Spanish-American War, is somewhat of an intersection between these two genres. Though technically not a Western, it does often read like a horse opera that just happens to be set in the Caribbean.

The story opens in 1898, right after the USS Maine has been sunk in Havana Harbor but shortly before the United States has declared war on Spain. Ben Tyler, a cowboy by trade, gets out of Yuma Territorial Prison, where he has been incarcerated for bank robbery. He meets up with his old friend and former ranch boss Charlie Burke, who recruits Tyler into a scheme to ship horses from Galveston to Cuba. The horses are just a cover, however, for a smuggled shipment of guns to be sold to the Cuban revolutionaries fighting for independence from Spain. When Tyler and Burke arrive in Cuba, however, they are double-crossed by their contacts in Cuba and harassed by Cuban law enforcement. This puts Tyler and Burke in a difficult position from which they must escape if they hope to obtain their hard-earned profit and take revenge on their antagonists.

I’m a fan of Leonard’s writing in general, but this is not his best work. Transplanting his usual crime caper fare to this historical setting should have worked out fine, but here in some cases the history gets in the way of the crime fiction and vice versa. Just when the heist plot seems to be gaining momentum, the reader gets diverted into a historical aside. I don’t think it’s necessary that the reader know the barrel width of every gun on every battleship, nor the failures of every general participating in the war. I prefer Leonard’s earlier Westerns, which would sometimes incorporate historical information—such as the Civil War in Last Stand at Sabrer River—but in a less obtrusive way. The plot of Cuba Libre is a bit low on thrills. There’s a comic undertone that nullifies much of the danger that would realistically occur in this scenario. The most exciting scene in the book happens towards the front, and the conclusion of the novel is less than climactic.

The characters are also not particularly interesting. They are rather thinly drawn and somewhat generic. If this book were made into a movie like most of Leonard’s novels, some quirky or charismatic actors could bring some interesting life to these characters, but on the page they come across as pretty bland. It’s also disappointing that only a few of the supporting characters are Cubans or Spaniards. All of the leads—the hero, the best friend, the leading lady, the villain—are white Americans. You learn more about the sugar industry and the American military’s part in the Spanish-American War than you do about Cuban culture or the revolution.

What Leonard is consistently good at is writing clever and lively dialogue and creating crime schemes that pit multiple parties against one another in configurations that keep the reader guessing as to the outcome. Both of those qualities are evident in Cuba Libre, but to a lesser extent than I recall from other books of his that I’ve read. The plot here feels safer and more predictable than the gritty realism of many of his Westerns or even the less serious contemporary adventures of his Raylan Givens novels. It’s still Elmore Leonard, though, and although Cuba Libre is unlikely to show up on any top ten list of his works, it’s still better than 90 percent of the crime fiction that’s out there.

Sound Man by Glyn Johns

Career retrospective of a record producer extraordinaire

Though I appreciate all kinds of music, the bulk of my listening time tends to be devoted to rock music of the 1960s and ‘70s (I was born in the middle of that period). With few exceptions, I generally don’t pay a whole lot of attention to who produces or engineers a recording. I have come to learn over the years, however, that if the name Glyn Johns is attached to an album, I’m probably going to like it and maybe even love it. Through his work as producer or sound engineer on such landmark albums as Who’s Next, Abbey Road, Let It Bleed, Led Zeppelin I, Slowhand, The Eagles, and many more, Johns did much to shape the sound of rock and roll during its formative and peak years. In his 2014 autobiography Sound Man, Johns recalls his stellar career recording some of the biggest names in popular music. If, like me, you’re a fan of Johns’s work, you’ll want to read this.

In Sound Man, Johns offers up a little bit of information about a lot of different people he’s worked with, so the approach could be characterized as broad in scope but shallow in depth. Johns has contributed his production, engineering, and/or mixing skills to hundreds of albums over the course of his career, and here he discusses about fifty of the most important projects and artists with whom he’s worked, so you get a few pages on each. As a result, the chapters are short, and the reading is brisk. At times, Johns seems to have compiled the narrative from his old appointment calendars. It’s not unusual for him to rattle off the names of a half dozen artists in a single paragraph: I worked on this, this, and this project; hopped on a plane to somewhere; had a meeting with so-and-so; than went back to mixing that album.

If you’re a fan of classic rock of the ‘60s and ‘70s, you will enjoy Johns’s perspective on the music business. His narrative does extend to 2014, but the bulk of the book deals with the classic bands of rock’s glory days. Johns has interesting stories to tell about the artists with whom he’s worked, but there aren’t really any major revelations here. This is very much a career memoir about the recording industry. Most of Johns’s anecdotes of his interactions with rock stars take place within the recording studio. There aren’t a lot of personal stories here. Johns never did any drugs, which probably kept him from penetrating the inner circle of many rock artists. The exception might be his relationship to the Rolling Stones. He worked on several of their records, accompanied them on tour, and formed a close friendship with Bill Wyman. Johns gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the personality dynamics within the band. If you’re a big fan of the Rolling Stones, however, you’ve probably read other books about them, so what Johns has to say here won’t surprise you. Beyond the Stones, Johns gives a fair amount of coverage to the Beatles, the Steve Miller Band, and the Eagles. Many of the moments that Johns recalls have since become familiar nuggets of rock-and-roll lore that most fans are already aware of, but Johns was actually present at these important turning points in music history.

In addition to the Hall of Fame-level artists that Johns discusses, he also mentions many musicians and bands that will be unfamiliar to those who aren’t British and didn’t grow up in the 1960s. That’s part of the fun of this sort of book, however—discovering previously unknown bands and nuggets of music history. Knowing Johns was behind the helm of their recordings makes me want to look up some of these artists who were previously unknown to me. I may not have learned a whole lot about the Rolling Stones or the Beatles from reading this book, but I did learn a lot about Johns and about how rock records were made in the good ol’ days. That, for me, made Sound Man a worthwhile read.

The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville

Philosophical dialogues with a riverboat grifter

Herman-Melville’s satirical novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was published in 1857. A “confidence man” was the term used in Melville’s day for what we now refer to by the abbreviated designation of a con man—“confidence” in this case meaning “trust”—one who preys on the trusting souls of others. The story takes place on a Mississippi River steamboat traveling from St. Louis to New Orleans. The novel takes the form of a series of dialogues between two or three characters, different in each chapter, one of whom is a con man seeking money through various deceptive mean such as outright begging (with a feigned disability), soliciting investments for an imaginary business, collecting alms for a faux charity, or practicing ineffective medicine as an “herb doctor.” The title and subtitle of the book tell you that all of these con man are the same person who has adopted various disguises, but there’s nothing in the text to indicate that, and it really doesn’t matter to the story, thin as it is.

The Confidence-Man is not a novel in the traditional sense of a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is more a patchwork of scenes, most of which take the form of philosophical dialogues. The theme of the con man is often abandoned entirely in favor of extended digressions on varied topics such as Native American rights, the reliability of boys (as young employees), whether one should loan money to a friend, and the difference between a loan and a gift. Some of Melville’s stylistic choices make for difficult reading: Very few of the characters in the book have names. Most are referred to by generic appellations such as “the stranger,” “the cosmopolitan,” “the merchant,” etc. Sometimes in the middle of a long chapter it’s difficult to remember who’s even talking to whom. Is the stranger in this chapter the same stranger as in the last chapter? Which one of these characters is the confidence man in disguise? To whom are these ubiquitous “he” pronouns referring? Most annoying is the way the characters utter the word “Confidence!” over and over again throughout the text as if it were some kind of mantra.

The characters in The Confidence-Man call to mind the caricaturesque figures in a John Caleb Bingham painting (a Missouri artist who painted a few riverboats in his time). They come from all backgrounds, classes, and walks of life. In Melville’s dialogues, however, they all speak with the flowery, erudite speech of characters in a Shakespearean play. Speaking of which, I’ve always found it rather amazing that Melville evolved from a sailor who wrote about his personal travels to America’s premier man of letters. Much like Shakespeare, however, most of today’s readers would need a bevy of explanatory footnotes to really understand all of Melville’s antiquated lingo and historical and literary references. The Confidence-Man is a comic novel, but only someone with a master’s degree in 19th-century literature would laugh out loud at the humor. Literary critics love The Confidence-Man because its hodgepodge amalgamation of fiction, dialogues, essays, and poetry makes for a precocious work of modernism that maybe even shows inklings of postmodern metafiction. Most nonacademic readers, however, will likely find that although the book has its insightful moments, the sum of its disparate ingredients adds up to something less than its individual parts. Even Melville admitted that The Confidence-Man was a vehicle for publishing short works that were rejected elsewhere.

I’m generally an admirer of Melville’s work, but I hated this. Every once in a while I would think “good point” or “that’s clever,” but I can’t say that at any point in reading The Confidence-Man I ever enjoyed it. Melville is one of America’s greatest authors, but this book is far from the Great American Novel, and one could argue that it’s not a novel at all, just a dumping ground for thoughts.

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert D. Kaplan

Eye-opening political history of Southeastern Europe

Robert D. Kaplan is an American journalist who writes on foreign affairs. In his book Balkan Ghosts, first published in 1993, Kaplan relates his experiences working and traveling in Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, and the former Yugoslavia. Kaplan wrote Balkan Ghosts after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the Bosnian War. The 2005 ebook contains some supplemental material that Kaplan wrote more recently, but the book is largely about the state of the Balkans circa 1990.

To fully understand the state of affairs in the 1990s, however, Kaplan looks much farther back in history, sometimes as far as the Middle Ages, and provides a quite comprehensive overview of the 19th and 20th century history of the region. This historical background goes far in explaining how the Balkans ended up at the end of the 20th century. This region didn’t just become an explosive powder keg in the 1990s. The fire of sectarian hatred and violence has been simmering for centuries. It is common knowledge that World War I started with the Balkans (a Serbian assassin). Kaplan also makes the case that the Balkans influenced the origins of Nazism and World War II. His examination of recent dictators in Serbia, Romania, Greece, and elsewhere should serve as a cautionary tale of where America might be headed if we continue to dispense with our constitutional system of checks and balances.

Though Balkan Ghosts is advertised as a travel memoir, the bulk of the book is really history rather than travel writing. A travel writer would try to convince you to visit these places. As a journalist, Kaplan seems set on convincing you to stay away from them. He does want you to understand them, however, and does a very good job of helping you do so. Kaplan is a journalist and a war correspondent with the knowledge base of a geographer in Balkan Studies. His look at these Balkan nations is deeper than what you’d get in say, National Geographic, which would give you an inkling of the political climate, war trauma, and societal woes interspersed with scenes of hopeful resilience like a wedding ceremony or a newly opened museum. Kaplan, on the other hand, takes a more journalistic “if it bleeds, it leads” view that writing about anything other than politics and war would be frivolous. With the exception of visits to a few medieval monasteries, the text focuses almost entirely on ethnic violence, fascism, anti-Semitism, genocide, torture, and other atrocities. His perspective on the Balkans is more real and visceral than what you’d get in any popular media venue. Kaplan has almost nothing good to say about Romania, which from his account sounds like a horror show. He expresses a bit more warmth for Bulgaria and Greece.

In addition to his own observations and research, Kaplan gives the reader a literature review into the Western writers who traveled the region before him. In particular, he frequently makes reference to John Reed’s The War in Eastern Europe (1916) and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), and even delves as far back as Byzantine historians Procopius (AD 500-565) and Michael Psellus (c. 1018-c. 1096). While you feel like you’re getting a pretty thorough study of the Balkans from Kaplan, he also makes you want to seek out some of these earlier writings on the region.

This region of the world is not covered much in the American news media or our modern history books. Understanding the Balkans, however, is necessary to forming a compete picture of European history in recent centuries. Those looking for a travel memoir of the region might be disappointed in Kaplan’s approach to the subject, but those looking for an education in world history and politics will find Balkan Ghosts to be an eye-opening and rewarding read.  

Avengers: Kree/Skrull War by Roy Thomas, et al.

Nine landmark issues, somewhat overrated

The Kree/Skrull War is one of Marvel Comics’ most lauded story arcs, held in high reverence much like the X-Men’s Dark Phoenix saga or Spider-Man’s death of Gwen Stacy. If you happened to miss those issues when you were younger, you could only feel bad about it. Now, of course, Marvel has a slew of reprints to keep one apprised of classic issues. Avengers: Kree/Skrull War, a hardcover edition from 2022, reprints Avengers issues 89 to 97, which were originally released from 1971 to 1972. To get you up to speed, as issue 89 opens, the Hulk’s friend Rick Jones has some sort of quantum entanglement with Mar-Vell (the original male Captain Marvel). The two occasionally switch places, even when they are in different universes. Clint Barton, who’s usually Hawkeye, has adopted the persona of Goliath using Hank Pym’s Pym particles. Pym himself is now the Yellowjacket, though he does appear as Ant-Man for one issue.

For all its hallowed importance in Marvel history, the writing of the Kree/Skrull saga is not particularly exceptional. This story was done before the age of Marvel’s mega-crossovers, and these issues doesn’t really seem like Thomas intended to pen a monumental nine-issue epic. Instead, it reads like he just made the story up as he went along, one issue at a time. Although ostensibly this story arc is about a war between the Kree and the Skrulls, only a few panels actually show those two alien races battling each other. Both worlds are trying to conquer Earth for strategic reasons, so what you get is the Avengers battling the Kree and the Avengers battling the Skrulls. The Avengers even battle the Inhumans, which seems unnecessary. At one point, a bunch of old superheroes from the 1940s make an appearance to fight the Avengers’ battles for them. Again, this all feels very much like it was made up on the fly. Like too many of Marvel’s cosmic sagas, the ultimate conclusion relies not on any intelligent problem solving on the part of the heroes but rather on one nearly omnipotent being basically just making everything all right with a gesture.

I’ve always thought of Avengers as the most DC of Marvel Comics. It has plenty of heroes on hand acting heroically, but they’re all more interesting in their own solo books. In Avengers, those heroes are generally stripped of their personal lives, personalities, and any degree of edginess or moral ambiguity. During this period in Avengers history, Rick Jones is performing the function that Snapper Carr played in DC’s Justice League of America: a mortal human with whom teenagers can identify. Here he’s made out to be a teen idol in the Ricky Nelson mold. (Always a decade behind the times, in the ‘90s Rick would become a hair-metal rocker.) Like a dumping ground for unproven B-list characters who don’t merit their own books, the Avengers comics often elevate minor characters into leading roles, even when those characters aren’t interesting enough to carry a story. Marvel is still making the same mistake nowadays with its Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Is anyone dying in anticipation for that upcoming Wonder Man movie?)

The story may be goofy, but those who enjoy Marvel comics of this era will appreciate that. From my comments above, it’s clear that I’m not a fan of the Avengers comics, but I still enjoyed the Kree/Skrull War. When the story takes a ridiculous turn, you can always just bask in the glorious illustration.   

I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson

Kansas couple explores the world

Martin Johnson was a young man from Independence, Kansas, when Jack London hired him as a crew member on his yacht, the Snark, as detailed in Martin’s book Through the South Seas with Jack London (1913). London became ill and had to return to the U.S., but Johnson continued his journey and actually made it all the way around the world. After returning to Kansas, he married Osa Leighty from the equally small town of Chanute. Rather than settle down with his new bride, Martin was determined to continue his life of adventure. He invited Osa to share in his exotic exploits, and she was game for the challenge. The couple traveled the world and achieved fame for their wildlife photography, documentary filmmaking, and travel books. After Martin’s death, Osa published her autobiography I Married Adventure. It was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1940.

I Married Adventure recounts the couple’s youth and courtship in Kansas and details their subsequent adventures in the Solomon Islands, Borneo, and four trips to Africa, where they lived for a few years. Martin, the photography expert, bought the camera equipment and developed all the film. Osa was not just a passive passenger, however. She served as Martin’s right-hand woman. In addition to appearing on camera, Osa shot photos and film, shot dinner when necessary, drove a truck, managed staff, and entertained visiting dignitaries to camp like George Eastman of the Kodak company and the Duke and Duchess of York.

I admire Martin and Osa for their adventurous spirits, and I envy their travels. As a Kansan for most of my life, I also enjoyed the small-town-couple-make-it-big aspect of the story. The era in which the Johnsons traveled, however, wasn’t known for its ecological or ethnographical consciousness. The Johnsons hire 250 native porters to carry their supplies through hundreds of miles of wilderness, knowing full well that some of those porters are probably going to die along the way. If the porters aren’t moving fast enough, Martin whips them. When they reach their destination, they level swaths of forest to build a small, semi-permanent town, complete with decorative curtains and other frivolous amenities that some poor laborer had to schlep to the site. Osa brags about scattering invasive American flower seeds all over Africa. The couple have no qualms about shooting with guns the animals that they are shooting with cameras. Many anecdotes explain how the Johnsons would get as close as they could to the animals they were filming—lions, rhinos, water buffalo—until the animal would charge one spouse, and then the other would shoot the animal dead. Although the Johnsons occasionally traveled with zoologists from the American Museum of Natural History, Martin and Osa were photographers not scientists, not even amateur scientists. As a result, from this account by Osa you don’t really learn a whole lot about the animals or indigenous people that they encountered.

Although Osa clearly loved Martin, you don’t get much of a sense of his personality from this book, in which he comes across as something of a cipher. You almost get the impression that Osa really didn’t know him very well. That’s not a comment on their marriage, but rather a comment on her writing. This, however, was my grandparents’ generation, when people were more private and dignified when discussing their relationships. If spouses ever disagreed on anything, you wouldn’t hear it from Osa or my grandmother.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the Johnsons are still fondly remembered in their home state of Kansas. The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Chanute is devoted to their lives, travels, and works. Reading this entertaining biography definitely makes we want to check it out.