If instead of pod people we were simply iPods...

Saramago you kill me. I thought I was going to have nightmares about dogs chewing on fetid corpses on a street filled with excrement, instead I stayed up all night to finish the book (in English I'm afraid.) From the generosity of friends who lend sprang coincidence, because I read Blindness immediately after reading Chromophobia.

Batchelor writes of 'minimalist' interiors as places of empty white space, as "a model of what the body should be like from within. Not a place of fluids, organs, muscles, tendons and bones all in a constant, precarious and living tension with each other, but a vacant hollow, whited chamber, scraped clean, cleared of any evidence of the grotesque embarassments of an actual life." It is precisely the epidemic of white blindness in Saramago's novel that creates a world where death, waste, sex and violence can no longer be sanitized -- it is when the interior becomes a true vacant whiteness that civilization topples.

And during both all I could think of was The Tale of the Body Thief, when Lestat is so disgusted that leaving his vampire body means returning to the world of head colds and shitting. Funny how whatever you read when you were thirteen stays with you forever.