Blind: Roman (German Edition)

leondumoulin.nl English-German Dictionary: Translation for Roman shade [blind].
Table of contents

I love the changes but it's made me think about how we view the typography of novels. I wanted to clearly convey that these sections belonged to a different time and also differed in style, being exclusively from Kathleen Eaden's point of view. The same could be said for any fonts used for meta-fiction.

My year-old, rereading the Harry Potter books, leaves out The Daily Prophet sections, the parts written in a heavy newspaper typeface. We go back and re-read those sections if they're not explained later and we need to fill in the gaps. You don't want people to skim them. She was so persuasive that we reverted to the usual font with the sections being headed Kathleen.

All of which makes me wonder if I've become rather conservative not just in the way in which I react to fonts when reading but when writing. I tend to write in Times New Roman or Cambria, liking the implied authority and the way in which it is similar to the Sabon MT used by Hodder for my novel. In other words, the fact that it looks like a "proper" book.

The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, mirroring the society outside. Anxiety over the availability of food, caused by delivery irregularities, acts to undermine solidarity; and lack of organization prevents the internees from fairly distributing food or chores. Soldiers assigned to guard the asylum and look after the well-being of the internees become increasingly antipathetic as one soldier after another becomes infected.

The military refuse to allow in basic medicines, so that a simple infection becomes deadly. Fearing a break out, soldiers shoot down a crowd of internees waiting upon food delivery. Conditions degenerate further as an armed clique gains control over food deliveries, subjugating their fellow internees and exposing them to rape and deprivation. Faced with starvation, internees battle each other and burn down the asylum, only to discover that the army has abandoned the asylum, after which the protagonists join the throngs of nearly helpless blind people outside who wander the devastated city and fight one another to survive.

The breakdown of society is near total.

Law and order, social services, government, schools, etc. Families have been separated and cannot find each other. People squat in abandoned buildings and scrounge for food. Violence, disease, and despair threaten to overwhelm human coping. The doctor's wife is the only character in the entire novel who does not lose her sight.

English-German Dictionary

This phenomenon remains unexplained in the novel. Unwilling to leave her husband to be interned, she lies to the doctors and claims to be blind. At this point she is interned with the rest of the afflicted. Once inside, she attempts to help the compound organize, but she is increasingly unable to hold back the animality of the compound. When one ward begins withholding food and demanding that the women of other wards submit to being raped in return for food, she kills the leader of their ward. Once they escape the compound, she helps her group survive in the city.

The doctor's wife is the de facto leader of their small group, although in the end she often serves their disabled needs.

leondumoulin.nl dictionary :: Roman blind :: English-German translation

The doctor is an ophthalmologist stricken blind after treating a patient with what will come to be called "the white sickness". He is among the first to be quarantined along with his wife. Due to his medical expertise he has a certain authority among those quarantined. Much of this really comes from his wife not having gone blind; she is able to see what is going on on the ward and relay this to her husband. When the group from his ward finally escapes they end up travelling to and staying in the doctor and his wife's apartment.

Several of the other main characters had been visiting the doctor's office when the epidemic begins to spread. The girl with the dark glasses is a former part-time prostitute who is struck blind while with a customer.

She is unceremoniously removed from the hotel and taken to the quarantine. Once inside, she joins the small group of people who were contaminated at the doctor's office. When the car thief gropes her on the way to the lavatory, she kicks him — giving him a wound from which he will eventually die. While inside, she also takes care of the boy with the squint, whose mother is nowhere to be found. At the end of the story, she and the old man with the black eye patch become lovers.

The old man with the black eye patch is the last person to join the first ward.

Navigation menu

He brings with him a portable transistor radio that allows the internees to listen to the news. He is also the main architect of the failed attack on the ward of hoodlums hoarding the food rations. Once the group escapes the quarantine, the old man becomes the lover of the girl with the dark glasses. The dog of tears is a dog that joins the small group of blind when they leave the quarantine.

While he is mostly loyal to the doctor's wife, he helps the whole group by protecting them all from packs of dogs who are becoming more feral by the day. He is called the dog of tears because he became attached to the group when he licked the tears off the face of the doctor's wife. The boy with the squint was a patient of the doctor's, which is most likely how he became infected.

He is brought to the quarantine without his mother and soon falls in with the group in the first ward. The girl with the dark glasses feeds him and takes care of him like a mother. After the first blind man was struck blind in traffic, a car thief brought him home and, subsequently stole his car. Soon after he went blind, the car thief and the first blind man re-encounter one another in the quarantine, where they soon come to blows.

They have no time to resolve their issues, though, since the car thief is the first internee killed by the guards.


  • Blindness (novel) - Wikipedia.
  • !
  • Flora Domestica or The Portable Flower Garden;

He is gunned down while trying to ask the guards for medication for his infected leg. The first man to go blind is struck blind in the middle of traffic, waiting at a stoplight.


  1. Outrunning The Storm.
  2. The Great American Bathroom Book, Volume 3: Summaries of All-Time Great Books.
  3. .
  4. .

    5. He is immediately taken home and then to the doctor's office, where he infects all of the other patients.