JOSÉ Mª ROMÁN DÍAZ B2 TUES 11 NUMBER 43
A REVIEW DESCRIBING A PERSONAL VISION ABOUT “THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND”
When this short story was proposed to be read, the overall idea that I had about H.G.Wells was that this author was well considered as a science-fiction writer and I had read some of his books of this genre. However, I had never considered him writing a sort of bittersweet tale for adults about an isolated society where everybody is blind, and how a foreigner can disturb the peace and the rules imposed by the tradition. The story is set in the early years of the past century in an imaginary society where Nunez, a stranger who can see, has to struggle to adapt himself to the rest of the people. Such strong prejudices do they have that he is forced to leave the valley, and Nunez ’s initial idea of becoming their king and finding love has to be abandoned.
One of the strengths of the story is the way the author makes us believe a plot that could be considered farfetched if the writer were less skilful at telling us the way this society is. Even when the author doesn’t spend a lot of time describing the characters, you can see them as real people, only with some little details that Wells gives little by little. As for the plot, it is extremely gripping although the action scenes are scarcely one or two, but when you finish reading it, you have the impression of having been riding on a roller coaster.
If I have to say something negative about the book, the only thing would be the huge amount of English vocabulary, sometimes old fashioned words, that we have to look up, but this is something related to our lack of knowledge instead of to the quality of the tale.
I would highly recommend this very well-written story, not only for the plot that is food for your thought, as well as the moral and how you can consider it as a metaphor of our society. I would say that this book can be specially appreciated by teenagers because they usually feel in the way that Nunez did. I dare say this character could be Wells’s “alter ego” because he considered himself as a one-eyed man in a country of blind.
