José Saramago’s novel centered on a mysterious plague of white blindness is *Blindness*. Published in Portuguese in 1995 as *Ensaio sobre a cegueira*, it follows an unnamed city whose population suddenly loses its sight in an unexplained epidemic.
The catastrophe quickly becomes a test of social order. The government confines the first victims in an abandoned asylum, where overcrowding, fear, hunger, and violence expose how fragile institutions can be. The doctor’s wife, the only major character who retains her sight, secretly joins the quarantine and becomes the group’s guide.
Saramago deliberately leaves the city, country, and most characters unnamed, giving the disaster a universal quality. The blindness is not explained medically; it functions as both a fictional epidemic and a metaphor for moral and political failure. A common mix-up is the 2004 sequel, *Seeing*, which explores a related society but is not the novel about the original outbreak. The book was translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero in 1997 and adapted into a 2008 film directed by Fernando Meirelles.