Sight Unseen

Anthony Storr

This is a fascinating account of how determination, courage and intelligence can surmount a dreadful affliction. Those who read it will find that their attitude to the blind has been permanently altered, which is what the author intended.
— Literary Review Magazine

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this blend of memoir and pointed cultural criticism, novelist (Home for the Summer), essayist and translator Kleege describes how she has come to terms with being blind in a world that fears and stigmatizes blindness. In 1967, at the age of 11, she was diagnosed with macular degeneration, told there was no cure or hope of improvement and declared legally blind. So Kleege, who is able to discern some light, color, movement and form, learned to hide her impairment. In school, she memorized pages of text in anticipation of being asked to read aloud, and determined what school friends were seeing by their tone of voice. With erudition that only partially belies her fury, Kleege goes on to explore the cultural meanings of blindness, dismantling negative stereotypes about the blind, including those perpetuated by such Hollywood films as Wait Until Dark and The Paradine Case and novels such as Eden Close. She also contrasts her visual experiences with those of the fully sighted and explains how, as a writer for whom reading was central, she has developed workable reading techniques. Although she was discouraged from learning braille as a child because she had "too much sight," Kleege now considers it a useful and pleasurable supplement to recorded tapes and magnification devices. Although sometimes didactic, Kleege gives readers an enlightening look at life with marginal eyesight. Agent, Mildred Marmur. (Mar.) FYI: Readers interested in this title might also enjoy Planet of the Blind by Stephen Kuusisto.

Library Journal

Novelist and essayist Kleege sees less than ten percent of what a normally sighted person does. Her brooding "coming out narrative" consists of eight essays detailing the experiences of a legally blind person in a sighted world. Kleege first considers the negative cultural attitudes toward blindness and how the disability is depicted in films and literature. She describes in bruising detail how and what she is able to see and recalls the years that she and her disappointed parents (both artists) spent concealing her condition. In the final chapters, Kleege describes the methods she uses to read, including recorded books and Braille, a recently acquired skill that she feels has allowed her to accept her condition and "announce my blindness without apology." Although a sense of unfairness underpins this intense memoir, Kleege's skill at articulating her personal struggle does enable one to appreciate what a blind person "sees." Recommended for most libraries and anyone associated with the visually impaired.--Carol Ann McAllister, Coll. of William & Mary Lib., Williamsburg, VA

Arthur C. Danto

[A] strong and interesting book, intended...to modify the way that the signed view the sightless or the near-sightless, which is her own condition....[I]t belongs with the larger literature of texts written by the discriminated-against for the use of those who discriminate....[W]hat Keege wants to say is that she is different without being other.
— The New Republic

Kirkus Reviews

Well-crafted essays on blindness and sightedness that clarify for the sighted not only what it's like to be blind but what it's like to be perceived as blind. "I am legally blind" is how the visually impaired Kleege introduces herself both to her writing class students and to her readers. At age 11 macular degeneration robbed her of a large measure of her central vision, but it did not prevent her from graduating magna cum laude from Yale or from pursuing a career as a writer and teacher of writing (at Ohio State University and the University of Oklahoma). She shares her personal story with telling anecdotes about her early attempts to appear sighted, about drawing for her artist father, of using her peripheral vision to view paintings in a museum, and of a visit to the home of Louis Braille to pay tribute to man who developed the reading and writing system that has given her a freedom that none of the new technologies for the blind could provide. The teacher in Kleege doesn't stop with personal anecdotes, however, for here her intent is clearly to instruct the sighted about what blindness means and what it doesn't mean. She analyzes how the blind have been portrayed on film (Scent of a Woman, Wait Until Dark, Places in the Heart, etc.) and in literature (Jane Eyre, The Light That Failed, Oedipus Rex, etc.), demonstrating how blindness has often been equated with a pitiful helplessness, loss of sexuality, and even as appropriate retribution for some monstrous crime. Her argument that filmmakers regard blindness as their worst nightmare and therefore treat the blind disparagingly fails to persuade, but her perplexed musings on what eye contact really means are intriguing, and her vividdescriptions of her own visual experiences are fascinating. Not always a comfortable read-there's a fair amount of irritation expressed here-but certainly an eye-opening one. .