In which Saramago disappoints me

So I'm looking for surreal fiction to read and NoveList suggests Haruki Murakami, William S. Burroughs, and Jose Saramago. I read After Dark and that's a nice little tale and then I read Naked Lunch and that makes no sense but in a rather pleasant way and then I follow up with Blindness. I could deal with the writing style where paragraphs were pages long and the dialogue is separated by commas with no he said, she said and only capitalization to indicate a new speaker. I could plow through that obnoxiousness. However I couldn't ignore the rampant stupidity, the transparent and trite lesson equating loss of sight to loss of morality and the inability to "see" the humanity of others.

So a bunch of people struck by a "white blindness" are herded into the wing of an abandoned insane asylum to quarantine them from society while those that still see but have been exposed occupy the opposite wing, while the military runs the detention from the outside. One, I think it would have been much better if he'd cut out the role of the military and the group of contaminated but seeing detainees. That would have left him with only a civilization struck by an unknown illness and would have made his "moral" less muddled. If those who lost their "moral vision" were sunk into savagery and anarchy what was up with the military? You could argue that they were afraid but if they just followed their protocols they would be fine.

Which brings me to a point that bugs me. He ignores perfectly reasonable solutions to the problem in an attempt (I assume) to bring about a feeling of magical realism but he focuses too often on the nitty-gritty of living to allow complete suspension of disbelief. There's a focus on bodily functions, feces smeared floors, burying of corpses, festering wounds, and incredibly tedious descriptions of people attempting to orient themselves in their new environment while the narrator ponders weightily at you. The logistics of keeping several hundred unexpected prisoners is nit-picked over but nobody has a fucking bio-hazard suit? There are no quarantine areas with decontamination chambers? Nobody thinks to hire a few caretakers who are already blind and acclimated to keep order in the wings? The detainees are so incompetent that they are unable to organize them selves despite the disability? That's the first thing people do when they find themselves in strange situations. Well maybe that happened after page 108 because that's where I stopped. I said to myself "this author is trying to be dark and edgy. I bet there's an unnecessary and graphic rape ahead." So I checked the Amazon reviews and I must be psychic because apparently there is indeed a lovingly described gang rape scene. Joy. Don't be subtle, Saramago, why don't you tell us what you think of humanity. Anyway, I will continue on my quest for real surreal, experimental fiction.