The doctor's wife brought the glass to the boy with the squint's lips and said, Here is your water, drink slowly, slowly, and savour it, a glass of water is a marvellous thing, she was not talking to him, she was not talking to anyone, simply communicating to the world what a marvellous thing a glass of water is.

"The boy with the squint's lips" is just fugly prose. And writers who do dialogue "creatively" like that will be first against the wall when my literary revolution comes. It's especially annoying in English because of our capitalised first-person pronoun, so when a line of dialogue begins with "I", you don't know whether it's the same person speaking or someone else. Another translation issue is the lack of an English noun meaning "cego", a blind person, resulting in the clunky rendering "blind person/people" taking up ~2% of the damn book. I mean everyone is fucking blind, that's the point of the story, so I'd have just translated it as "person/people", but OK that's not Saramago's fault. What is his fault is the frequent fatuity of the narration, e.g.:

...her husband only stole cars, goods which on account of their size cannot be hidden under the bed.

On account of their size! Fascinating. And what is also his fault is the wholesale adoption of the comma splice as a cheap device to keep the eyeballs moving. It's deplorable, but it worked on me as I rushed — to hasten its end — through this vacuous book, blatantly written to draw thicko blurbs like the one on the back of mine ("a powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses — and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit") without actually saying anything at all beyond "wouldn't it be fucked up if everyone went blind".

No wonder he got a Nobel.