Book review: Notes On Blindness: A Journey Through The Dark

If you are a sighted person and wonder what it might be like to lose the visual world, the gripping Notes On Blindness will challenge your preconceptions about the condition and leave you reeling at the complexities of a life deprived of sight.

John Hull

Profile Books, pb, €10.60 (ebook €3.34)

Writing movingly of how he finally came to identify as a blind person and relinquish those things every sighted person takes for granted, the academic Hull, who died in 2015, has a flair for evoking the sensations, ironies and even moral quandaries of the blind.

For instance, how to escape tedious conversations at parties when you can’t see a friend to head for?

First published in 1990 under the title Touching The Rock, this edition ties in with its BAFTA-nominated cinematic namesake, and contains an introduction by Cathy Rentzenbrink.

As an account of dealing with disability, it remains as visceral and lucid as it did when first published.