José Saramago is the greatest writer of modern Portugal, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. “Blindness” is one of his most famous books, a kind of calling card of the author along with “The Gospel of Jesus” and “Memoirs of a Monastery.” Residents of a nameless city in a nameless country are struck by a mysterious epidemic of blindness. In an attempt to contain its spread, the authorities introduce the strictest quarantine and begin to move all sick people to an empty country hospital, under the supervision of the army. The main characters of the novel - an ophthalmologist who was unable to protect himself from the disease and his wife, who fakes blindness in order to stay with her husband - are looking for grains of order in a world that is uncontrollably sliding into chaos... In 2008, a large-budget film adaptation of this novel directed by Fernando Meirelles was released. "City of God", "The Constant Gardener"), starring Julianne Moore and Gael Garcia Bernal.