José Saramago
Cecità

Proposing this book during the joyful, cheerful, and lighthearted Christmas holiday period is like finding your ex in bed during your honeymoon. If you truly believe in the tons of vile optimism that surround us these days, then feel free to tell me to go to hell without any problems. I might ruin the atmosphere for you.

The threats to humanity invented on paper and film often take on strange forms: a meteorite rushing, a volcano belching, atoms dancing, lethal viruses being born and growing out of control, aliens shooting on roller coasters, thirsty vampires, planets aligning, the apocalypse. There is a common denominator in all this potpourri of more or less inspired fantasy. Whatever the danger to mankind, it must be something incredible. Something unimaginable.

The reason is clear: because according to the law of contrast, the more seemingly invincible the adversary to defeat, the more it demonstrates the strength of our society founded on obese pillars that, damn it, aren't so easy to uproot.

Streets full of excrement, avoiding them has become impossible. Stray dogs eat bodies in various stages of decomposition. Decay has taken over the atmosphere above the city, and the stale air of a house, like an intoxicating and precious fragrance, is to be preserved most jealously. There are no sounds of machinery, transport, or communication. There is no longer a state with its laws to respect, no army to fear, and not even any citizens to converse with. Names no longer make sense, nor do education, schooling, and books. With rhetoric, with fundamental rights and the constitution; yes, with those bricks costing millennia and liters of blood, now people wipe their asses on the street after spraying a bit of diarrhea.

We go back to being animals. The doctor does so more slowly and with many regrets, the thief at a much faster pace. But that's the path, and to survive, man adapts, realizing that almost everything he possessed and considered indispensable was, in reality, useless. He thought he had everything and had not understood the fragility of his life. To make them like this; cold-blooded killers, animals who fornicate for a piece of stale bread, it didn't take atomic bombs, meteorites, or Godzilla. It's terrifying, the image of the grass continuing to grow lush on the nearby lawn and knowing that the plants bear fruits no one collects. The world isn't dying; only we are.

A barrier of dense milk in front of the eyes to show all the limits of contemporary society. Precisely because the threat does not take on the features of the unfathomable, of extreme fantasy, this essay is distressing. I didn't think it possible, but it is even more so than "The Road" by Cormac. This work by Saramago is a meticulous and lucid treatise that examines a hypothesis that is by no means science fiction. It particularly hurts because the consequences are tremendously logical, with no apparent slip-ups that fuel the plot.

Diseases mutate and are born continuously; this one is even known and not even lethal: it has "only" changed its dress, becoming contagious. Yet, it was enough to make the entire grand edifice of contemporary humanity collapse without appeal in a handful of days, revealing that the foundations were much shakier than believed. It's a snapshot of the blindness of our society and the death of feelings in favor of a return to primal instincts we thought we'd buried forever.

Dry descriptions, of devastating power and without the slightest glimmer of rhetoric, relentlessly hit for 250 pages. I read them in one go, but I reached the end more exhausted than ever. And damn my eyes, I didn't close them easily when going to sleep. When the dark finally came, I reopened them a couple of times: just to be sure that this book didn't infect me through osmosis with this terrifying milky nightmare.

And I don't give a damn if it's cheesy and tacky. I'm closing this review with a fat and mammoth buy or die, and I'll add an exclamation point at the end. Outstanding!