José Saramago

The inspiration for the major motion picture "Enemy" starring Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Denis Villeneuve

Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a divorced, depressed history teacher. To lift his spirits, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. Tertuliano watches the film, unimpressed. But during the night, when he is awakened by noises in his apartment, he goes into the living room to find that the VCR is replaying the video. He watches

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"A city is hit by an epidemic of 'white blindness' which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to a empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers--among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears--through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings...

A city is ravaged by an epidemic of 'white blindness.' Those first afflicted are quarantined by the authorities in an abandoned mental hospital where societal norms quickly breaks down. Criminals and the physically powerful prey upon the weak, hording the meager food rations and committing horrific acts. Inside the hospital is one eyewitness to the nightmare. Following her husband into the hospital, a woman whose sight is unaffected by the plague...