Seems like the entire grim (but wonderful) corpus of Cormac McCarthy has recently been swept into movie lately (“No Country for Old Men”, the forthcoming version of “The Road”).

Looks like it doesn’t stop there. I stumbled across this preview of a screen adaptation of Jose Saramago’s Blindness: an epic, grueling work by a Nobel-prize-winning novelist. I read this book in early 2002 in Mexico. It wasn’t exactly a vacation read. I would actually put The Road and Blindness on my top ten list of most horrific settings–I can’t even imagine seeing this movie. I am, however, curious to see how gracefully the movie makes the adaptation to an American/English-speaking backdrop. Saramago writes in Portuguese and the European/Mediterranean feel of the book itself is palpable.

The premise in short: everyone but one woman goes blind in a mysterious epidemic. Cannibalistic and gore hilarity ensue. Lots of crazy. Dogs eating dead people. Stuff like that.

If you’re interested, there’s also a sequel to Blindness, called, not surprisingly, Seeing. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a few months while I build up the courage to read it.

Via Powell’s Books.BLOG