Status
Available
Series
Genres
Publication
Harcourt (2006), Edition: F First American Edition, 320 pages
Description
On election day in the capital, it is raining so hard that no one has come out to vote. The politicians are growing jittery. Should they reschedule for another day? Around three o'clock, the rain finally stops. At four, voters rush to the polling stations, as if ordered to appear. But when the ballots are counted, more than 70% are blank. The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. The president proposes that a wall be built around the city. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that hit the city four years before, and of the one woman who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? Is she the organizer of a conspiracy against the state? What begins as a satire on governments and the sometimes dubious efficacy of the democratic system turns into something far more sinister.--From publisher description.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member roblong
I was fascinated by the premise and the first half of the book was very enjoyable - really funny and droll. As it went on, however, I had two problems. Firstly, although I probably should have, I hadn't realised that this is a sequel to his novel Blindness, which I haven't read. It's not too bad,
On the whole worth a read, but the first half vastly outshines the second.
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but a couple of recurring characters and a link to the previous book mean it would be worth reading the previous work first. Secondly, and more seriously, while the latter part of the book is often funny, Saramago's view of government is very one-dimensional, and so the spirit of the ending is clear for a long time, and not at all interesting.On the whole worth a read, but the first half vastly outshines the second.
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LibraryThing member myfanwy
In his first book, Blindness, Saramago provides us with one seeing women as witness to the tragedy that ensues when one after the next all the people of this (unnamed) town fall to an epidemic of white blindness. Throughout the books he never refers to anyone by name. They are simply called "the
Reading Seeing let me see that the cumbersome style is just how Saramago writes. No one is blind in Seeing and yet we still hear next to nothing to identify the characters. In this case, there is a freak occurence where 85% of the votes in an election turn up blank. In true Strangelove manner, the government acts completely inexplicably to rout the insurgency, including leaving the capital, inciting strikes, bombing subways, and conducting assassinations. The reason why I actually liked this book better than Blindness is that the populace draws together and acts with human decency. The absurdity is confined within a select few, artfully described as conniving, power-hungry politicos and their ignorant or ignoble colleagues. Everyone understands the absurdity of the situation and decides to live out their lives in peace nonetheless. The book is still written in a jarring style, but at least it left me with less repugnance than Blindness.
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first blind man", the "girl with the dark glasses", and so forth. Further, his style is such that it is never entirely clear who is speaking. His paragraphs go on for pages with only capitalizations showing where one speaker begins and no clear designation of who is speaking. For a world turned blind this is an interesting if intrusive style.Reading Seeing let me see that the cumbersome style is just how Saramago writes. No one is blind in Seeing and yet we still hear next to nothing to identify the characters. In this case, there is a freak occurence where 85% of the votes in an election turn up blank. In true Strangelove manner, the government acts completely inexplicably to rout the insurgency, including leaving the capital, inciting strikes, bombing subways, and conducting assassinations. The reason why I actually liked this book better than Blindness is that the populace draws together and acts with human decency. The absurdity is confined within a select few, artfully described as conniving, power-hungry politicos and their ignorant or ignoble colleagues. Everyone understands the absurdity of the situation and decides to live out their lives in peace nonetheless. The book is still written in a jarring style, but at least it left me with less repugnance than Blindness.
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LibraryThing member lkernagh
This novel appeals to me on a number of levels. I tend to enjoy stories that take a swipe -be it comic or menacing – at political institutions and the governments that believe they are in control. In Seeing, the sequel to Saramago’s earlier novel Blindness, Saramago present readers with an
A grim, cautionary tale about entrenched politics.
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allegory of a ruling government facing a quiet rebellion by its citizens and their blank ballots (their gesture of non-confidence). While steeped in satire, this is very much a cautionary tale of just how easily a governing power uses its own panic to justify sweeping suspensions of civil liberties and spirals from the facade of a duly elected democracy into a more sinister oligarchy of power and control. While the story takes place 4 years after the events in Blindness, I believe one could read this story as a stand alone. Saramago provides enough information (minus the more harrowing scenes) from the earlier story to ground new readers. Now, I know that Saramago’s “run on stream of consciousness” writing style – with dense, long paragraphs, lack of punctuation and detached narrator experience – can be a little off putting for some readers. The trick to reading Saramago’s writing is to just let your mind read. Stop paying attention to the lack of punctuation and the way sentences seem to run into one another. You will actually be surprised at how well written and readable it actually is, but if not, I would highly recommend that you seek out an audiobook version so that you “hear” the story (Saramago’s stories work very well if read out loud!) A grim, cautionary tale about entrenched politics.
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LibraryThing member emily_morine
I found it useful to think about José Saramago's Seeing as, not so much a sequel to his earlier novel Blindness (though it takes place in the same unnamed European city, four years later), but as, fittingly enough, its photographic negative. Whereas Blindness is a brutally dark story with a
Seeing is a kind of political fable: the night after the election, an unnamed European government finds that 77 percent of the population of the capital city has cast blank votes. Alarmed, they declare a mistake and organize a second election (complete with reconnaissance agents stationed casually in line at voting booths to intercept any information about the supposed blank-vote conspiracy), and everything seems perfectly normal except for the now 83 percent of capital-city voters who cast blank ballots into the box. The government interprets this action as an "attack on democracy" and reacts with a steady stream of increasingly restrictive measures, none of which seem to do a bit of good or extract a modicum of information. Beginning by declaring a state of emergency and suspending all constitutional rights in the city (a change none of the citizens seem to notice), they progress to sending intelligence agents into the populace (no one is interested in talking about the blank votes), and detaining a random sampling of citizens whom they hold indefinitely for interrogation (everyone refuses to say who they voted for). As the citizens' dignified non-participation holds steady, the government gets more and more ruffled, eventually choosing to abscond absurdly in the dead of night with all its officials, police, paperwork, assistants, computers and assorted detritus and declaring a state of seige on the capital city, forbidding anyone to enter or leave before the government has received a tearful apology from the city at large.
Saramago's satirical ear is delightful fun to read, particularly the scenes in which the ministers of the various national departments squabble pointlessly while trying to decide on a course of action:
Sounds a bit odd to me, said the minister of culture, to my knowledge, anarchists have never, even in the realm of theory, proposed committing acts of this nature and of this magnitude, That, said the minister of defense sarcastically, may be because my dear colleague's knowledge dates back to the idyllic world of his grandparents, and, strange though it may seem things have changed quite a lot since then, there was a time when nihilism took a rather lyrical and not too bloody form, but what we are facing today is terrorism, pure and unadulterated, it may wear different faces and expressions, but it is, essentially, the same thing, You should be careful about making such wild claims and such facile extrapolations, commented the justice minister, it seems risky to me, not to say, outrageous, to label as terrorism, especially pure and unadulterated terrorism, the appearance in the ballot boxes of a few blank votes, A few votes, a few votes, spluttered the minister of defense, rendered almost speechless, how, I'd like to know, can you possibly call eighty-three out of every hundred votes a few votes, what we have to grasp, what we have to take on board, is that each one of those votes was like a torpedo striking below the water line, My knowledge of anarchism may be out of date, I don't deny it, said the minister of culture, but as far as I'm aware, although I certainly don't consider myself an expert on naval battles either, torpedoes always strike below the water line, they don't have much option, that is what they were made to do.
The above is a good example of Saramago's style in both of these books: phrases strung together with commas into long uber-sentences, characters designated by function rather than name, and dialogue marked by simple capitalization. Personally, I like reading him regardless of the content, but I think his narrative oddities work especially well to tell this particular story: Seeing, after all, is all about the mechanized aspect of human society, about how the slot we fill defines our relationships to other slots and therefore, but only tangentially, to other people. Only if we are very conscientious or very lucky can we manage to connect with another human AS another human, rather than as a function of her and our respective slots. Saramago's decision to mingle the dialogue into a single flowing stream of words seems to me to fit with this idea: the conversation above, for example, could be taking place among any ministers of culture, defense, and justice—petty squabbling and a greater or lesser respect for such concepts as hawkishness, the rule of law, wit, and individual prerogative, is likely to exist in any cabinet meeting. The event (the conversation) transcends, in some way, the individuals taking part in it, just as the reader's eye sees first the undifferentiated block of text, just as the epidemic of blank votes seems to transcend any individual voter or, indeed, any individual conspirator.
Saramago plays with these ideas incessantly: it is interesting to watch the characters who change throughout the book, and to note whether their designators change as well. In one case, the city council leader becomes disillusioned with the absent government and quits his post, becoming "the former council leader." His crisis of conscience results in a change of designator, although only in a negative sense: he doesn't become "the head of the resistance" or "the activist," but continues to be defined by the job he has chosen not to do. Later on, the police superintendent and his two assistants argue over whether to call a given suspect "the prostitute," "the wife of the man with the eye patch," or "the girl with the dark glasses." Readers of Blindness, who are familiar with this character as "the girl with the dark glasses," may feel like they "recognize" this appellation as her true identity: it is, in any case, more judgment-neutral than referring to her as a prostitute, and more respectful of her self-hood than designating her only by who her husband might be. I was rooting for "the girl with the dark glasses" to win out as title—which is funny, since in the novel Seeing she never appears with dark glasses at all. All this brings up interesting questions about identity: does someone who has known a person longer, necessarily know them better? When does a name, title, or designation no longer apply? What makes one mode of reference preferable to another? Are some experiences, such as the events of Blindness, so formative that, even though this woman no longer wears dark glasses, there is still some innate "rightness" to referring to her by that title?
As much as Seeing is preoccupied with the mechanistic, it does also acknowledge the soulful aspects of human existence, and I felt that Saramago interwove just enough moments of desperate honesty between individuals, so that his book gained depth and weight. I particularly loved his passage toward the beginning, in which a female interrogation subject has just proved to her interrogator the worthlessness of the government's lie detectors. "It's all your fault," he says, "you made me nervous,"
Of course it was my fault, it was the temptress eve's fault, but no one came to ask us if we were feeling nervous when they hooked us up to that contraption, It's guilt that makes you feel nervous, Possibly, but go and ask your boss why it is that you, who are innocent of all our evils, behaved like a guilty man, There's nothing more to be said, replied the agent, it's as if what happened just now never happened at all. Then, addressing the technician, Give me that strip of paper, and remember, say nothing, if you do, you'll regret you were ever born, Yes, sir, don't worry, I'll keep my mouth shut, So will I, said the woman, but at least tell the minister that no amount of cunning will do any good, we will all continue to lie when we tell the truth, and to tell the truth when we lie, just like him, just like you, now imagine if I had asked if you wanted to go to bed with me, what would you have said then, what would the machine have said.
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glimmer of hope toward the end, Seeing is a wickedly funny satire—a much lighter tone overall—but with a crushing bit of darkness at its close. Whereas Blindness does not hesitate to explore the vilest brutalities that humans perpetrate on each other, Seeing is oddly civilized—but while Blindness shows the reader the deep compassion and humaneness that can come out of hardship, Seeing implies that our more noble instincts might be beside the fact, an irrelevance in the face of the huge, facilely idiotic machine of national government. Having just finished Seeing, I'm left pondering which is the more pessimistic book: certainly Blindness spends more of its pages being viscerally difficult to read, but I can't help privileging their respective endings: in the one case, hope for a small band of individuals; in the other, the casual destruction of those individuals to suit the petty whims of clueless officials.Seeing is a kind of political fable: the night after the election, an unnamed European government finds that 77 percent of the population of the capital city has cast blank votes. Alarmed, they declare a mistake and organize a second election (complete with reconnaissance agents stationed casually in line at voting booths to intercept any information about the supposed blank-vote conspiracy), and everything seems perfectly normal except for the now 83 percent of capital-city voters who cast blank ballots into the box. The government interprets this action as an "attack on democracy" and reacts with a steady stream of increasingly restrictive measures, none of which seem to do a bit of good or extract a modicum of information. Beginning by declaring a state of emergency and suspending all constitutional rights in the city (a change none of the citizens seem to notice), they progress to sending intelligence agents into the populace (no one is interested in talking about the blank votes), and detaining a random sampling of citizens whom they hold indefinitely for interrogation (everyone refuses to say who they voted for). As the citizens' dignified non-participation holds steady, the government gets more and more ruffled, eventually choosing to abscond absurdly in the dead of night with all its officials, police, paperwork, assistants, computers and assorted detritus and declaring a state of seige on the capital city, forbidding anyone to enter or leave before the government has received a tearful apology from the city at large.
Saramago's satirical ear is delightful fun to read, particularly the scenes in which the ministers of the various national departments squabble pointlessly while trying to decide on a course of action:
Sounds a bit odd to me, said the minister of culture, to my knowledge, anarchists have never, even in the realm of theory, proposed committing acts of this nature and of this magnitude, That, said the minister of defense sarcastically, may be because my dear colleague's knowledge dates back to the idyllic world of his grandparents, and, strange though it may seem things have changed quite a lot since then, there was a time when nihilism took a rather lyrical and not too bloody form, but what we are facing today is terrorism, pure and unadulterated, it may wear different faces and expressions, but it is, essentially, the same thing, You should be careful about making such wild claims and such facile extrapolations, commented the justice minister, it seems risky to me, not to say, outrageous, to label as terrorism, especially pure and unadulterated terrorism, the appearance in the ballot boxes of a few blank votes, A few votes, a few votes, spluttered the minister of defense, rendered almost speechless, how, I'd like to know, can you possibly call eighty-three out of every hundred votes a few votes, what we have to grasp, what we have to take on board, is that each one of those votes was like a torpedo striking below the water line, My knowledge of anarchism may be out of date, I don't deny it, said the minister of culture, but as far as I'm aware, although I certainly don't consider myself an expert on naval battles either, torpedoes always strike below the water line, they don't have much option, that is what they were made to do.
The above is a good example of Saramago's style in both of these books: phrases strung together with commas into long uber-sentences, characters designated by function rather than name, and dialogue marked by simple capitalization. Personally, I like reading him regardless of the content, but I think his narrative oddities work especially well to tell this particular story: Seeing, after all, is all about the mechanized aspect of human society, about how the slot we fill defines our relationships to other slots and therefore, but only tangentially, to other people. Only if we are very conscientious or very lucky can we manage to connect with another human AS another human, rather than as a function of her and our respective slots. Saramago's decision to mingle the dialogue into a single flowing stream of words seems to me to fit with this idea: the conversation above, for example, could be taking place among any ministers of culture, defense, and justice—petty squabbling and a greater or lesser respect for such concepts as hawkishness, the rule of law, wit, and individual prerogative, is likely to exist in any cabinet meeting. The event (the conversation) transcends, in some way, the individuals taking part in it, just as the reader's eye sees first the undifferentiated block of text, just as the epidemic of blank votes seems to transcend any individual voter or, indeed, any individual conspirator.
Saramago plays with these ideas incessantly: it is interesting to watch the characters who change throughout the book, and to note whether their designators change as well. In one case, the city council leader becomes disillusioned with the absent government and quits his post, becoming "the former council leader." His crisis of conscience results in a change of designator, although only in a negative sense: he doesn't become "the head of the resistance" or "the activist," but continues to be defined by the job he has chosen not to do. Later on, the police superintendent and his two assistants argue over whether to call a given suspect "the prostitute," "the wife of the man with the eye patch," or "the girl with the dark glasses." Readers of Blindness, who are familiar with this character as "the girl with the dark glasses," may feel like they "recognize" this appellation as her true identity: it is, in any case, more judgment-neutral than referring to her as a prostitute, and more respectful of her self-hood than designating her only by who her husband might be. I was rooting for "the girl with the dark glasses" to win out as title—which is funny, since in the novel Seeing she never appears with dark glasses at all. All this brings up interesting questions about identity: does someone who has known a person longer, necessarily know them better? When does a name, title, or designation no longer apply? What makes one mode of reference preferable to another? Are some experiences, such as the events of Blindness, so formative that, even though this woman no longer wears dark glasses, there is still some innate "rightness" to referring to her by that title?
As much as Seeing is preoccupied with the mechanistic, it does also acknowledge the soulful aspects of human existence, and I felt that Saramago interwove just enough moments of desperate honesty between individuals, so that his book gained depth and weight. I particularly loved his passage toward the beginning, in which a female interrogation subject has just proved to her interrogator the worthlessness of the government's lie detectors. "It's all your fault," he says, "you made me nervous,"
Of course it was my fault, it was the temptress eve's fault, but no one came to ask us if we were feeling nervous when they hooked us up to that contraption, It's guilt that makes you feel nervous, Possibly, but go and ask your boss why it is that you, who are innocent of all our evils, behaved like a guilty man, There's nothing more to be said, replied the agent, it's as if what happened just now never happened at all. Then, addressing the technician, Give me that strip of paper, and remember, say nothing, if you do, you'll regret you were ever born, Yes, sir, don't worry, I'll keep my mouth shut, So will I, said the woman, but at least tell the minister that no amount of cunning will do any good, we will all continue to lie when we tell the truth, and to tell the truth when we lie, just like him, just like you, now imagine if I had asked if you wanted to go to bed with me, what would you have said then, what would the machine have said.
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LibraryThing member deebee1
This book is a sequel to the more popularly known Blindness. I liked the earlier book of course, but I think Seeing is much more witty and intelligent, and the satire inherent in all Saramago works is brought out fully in this book.
The story begins with the citizens of the capital of the same
The authorities try to pin down the source of this silent and bewildering (and for them, almost malevolent) defiance. The same characters we follow in Blindness reappear. They are identified by the authorities as "suspects" in this silent revolt, it could only be them, especially THAT woman, they say.
Seeing has less "mythical" power than Blindness but i find it more frightening because it is more realistic. We see how institutions of democracy could be perverted to serve the narrow interests of the political elite. Isn't that something we all recognize?
While the story overall is less visceral than Blindness, the punch happens at the very end, and it is even more shocking and memorable than what happens in Blindness where normality returns.
Blindness was unputdownable, but I liked Seeing even better.
The story begins with the citizens of the capital of the same
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unnamed country (who have recovered from the mysterious blindness episode) going to the polls. At the end of the day, the results showed that majority of the votes was blank. This puts the national government in a dilemma. They hold another round of voting. The outcome was even worse this time around. To deal with this catastrophe (for the government in question and all parties of the political spectrum) the government sets off a series of measures, from the benign to the most absurd and frightening that resembles Big Brother, which ends in the city being held "in siege." The authorities try to pin down the source of this silent and bewildering (and for them, almost malevolent) defiance. The same characters we follow in Blindness reappear. They are identified by the authorities as "suspects" in this silent revolt, it could only be them, especially THAT woman, they say.
Seeing has less "mythical" power than Blindness but i find it more frightening because it is more realistic. We see how institutions of democracy could be perverted to serve the narrow interests of the political elite. Isn't that something we all recognize?
While the story overall is less visceral than Blindness, the punch happens at the very end, and it is even more shocking and memorable than what happens in Blindness where normality returns.
Blindness was unputdownable, but I liked Seeing even better.
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LibraryThing member Cygnus555
Another outstanding book by Jose Saramago. I'm slowly working my way through all of his books - his writing style makes it so I can make it through one... but then must stop to catch a breath with other books.
Seeing was a bit more whimsical than his others... I found myself smiling and laughing
I have to say, I would never read Blindness again - that book depressed me to no end. But you must read that one before this.
Seeing was a bit more whimsical than his others... I found myself smiling and laughing
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from time to time. As always, his sentence constructions are entrancing.I have to say, I would never read Blindness again - that book depressed me to no end. But you must read that one before this.
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LibraryThing member Karlus
This book was a loser for me and I have discarded it from my library.
Mr. Saramago can certainly write finely honed satiric pages of commentary on modern-day political and media processes. Carefully read they are admirable in their satiric accuracy -- and even their literal accuracy -- and they are
Mr. Saramago can certainly write finely honed satiric pages of commentary on modern-day political and media processes. Carefully read they are admirable in their satiric accuracy -- and even their literal accuracy -- and they are
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a pleasure to read. In fact, his style of nearly unending sentences need not diminish the joy because they are so spot on. However, in this story -- told in unrelenting third-person narrative style, and without a human being or a human interest angle any place in sight early on -- even Saramago's implacable and unrelenting political posture quickly palls and begins to sound like one has heard it all before. The images that quickly crossed my mind were of endless Op-Ed pieces and canned journalistic news analyses. The Nobel Prize -- presumably for Saramago's literary merit, rather than political merit -- is of course not to be ignored, but this book was simply not for me. I bailed out early because I get my fill of endless political spouting in the news, day in and day out. Show Less
LibraryThing member goddamn_phony
Gave this my usual 100 pages before passing judgement. The narrative style was grating and the political satire was ham-handed and uninspiring, so I put it aside. I've heard Blindness is a great read: maybe I'll give it a crack before reattempting this one.
LibraryThing member janemarieprice
I loved [Blindness] and so was looking forward to this semi-sequel. Unfortunately it was a disappointment. The language is just as beautiful:
"The second voter took another ten minutes to appear, but from then on, albeit unenthusiastically, one by one, like autumn leaves slowly detaching themselves
And the premise is intriguing – that of an election where the majority of people submit blank ballots in the capital city, the government abandons the place, and political maneuverings follow in which the characters of [Blindness] become suspects. Somehow, though, it just didn’t hold my interest in the same way. I found the pacing extremely slow and kept setting it down for long periods.
I find the narration of both books fascinating. Sometimes it interjects as in this excerpt:
"or if it simply had to happen because that was its destiny, from which would spring soon-to-be-revealed consequences, forcing the narrator to set aside the story he was intending to write and to follow the new course that had suddenly appeared on his navigation chart. It is difficult to give such an either-or question an answer likely to satisfy such a reader totally. Unless, of course, the narrator wwere to be unusually frank and confess that he had never been quite sure how to bring to a successful conclusion this extraordinary tale of a city which, en masse, decided to return blank ballot papers"
Another interesting bit is the unnamed characters. everyone is referred to in some way in which they are known – their job, something that happened to them etc. – except the dog which does have a name. Curious.
"The second voter took another ten minutes to appear, but from then on, albeit unenthusiastically, one by one, like autumn leaves slowly detaching themselves
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from the boughs of a tree, the ballot papers dropped into the ballot box."And the premise is intriguing – that of an election where the majority of people submit blank ballots in the capital city, the government abandons the place, and political maneuverings follow in which the characters of [Blindness] become suspects. Somehow, though, it just didn’t hold my interest in the same way. I found the pacing extremely slow and kept setting it down for long periods.
I find the narration of both books fascinating. Sometimes it interjects as in this excerpt:
"or if it simply had to happen because that was its destiny, from which would spring soon-to-be-revealed consequences, forcing the narrator to set aside the story he was intending to write and to follow the new course that had suddenly appeared on his navigation chart. It is difficult to give such an either-or question an answer likely to satisfy such a reader totally. Unless, of course, the narrator wwere to be unusually frank and confess that he had never been quite sure how to bring to a successful conclusion this extraordinary tale of a city which, en masse, decided to return blank ballot papers"
Another interesting bit is the unnamed characters. everyone is referred to in some way in which they are known – their job, something that happened to them etc. – except the dog which does have a name. Curious.
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LibraryThing member Clara53
Just like "Blindness" (one of his recent books), this book by Jose Saramago is another masterpiece. Long (up to a page!) sentences, no name for characters, but so compelling that you just cannot put it down. There are references to "Blindness" in this book, the events are happening in the same town.
LibraryThing member the_awesome_opossum
The object of satire in Seeing hit a little too close to home to be fun. Seeing takes place in the same location as Blindness, four years after the epidemic. But now there's a new disruption of social order, more insidious than the blindness: voters at the capital turn up dutifully on election day
But the story, rather than following through on this apparent act of dissent and its causes, instead follows the politicians and their panicked ineptitude in the wake of election day. This focus didn't work for me at all; real politics are filled enough with incompetence and blame-shifting that I don't want need it extended into my novels as well. Seeing's story line gets tied definitely to Blindness about 2/3 of the way through, when the doctor's wife becomes the scapegoat for the entire crisis, simply because it's beyond the politicians to deal with multiple state problems without conflating them all.
Despite being the sequel to Blindness, which was an extraordinary book, Seeing is not equally irresistible. The satire was too often just depressing. So I guess it was effective? Just not a lot of fun.
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to cast mostly blank ballots.But the story, rather than following through on this apparent act of dissent and its causes, instead follows the politicians and their panicked ineptitude in the wake of election day. This focus didn't work for me at all; real politics are filled enough with incompetence and blame-shifting that I don't want need it extended into my novels as well. Seeing's story line gets tied definitely to Blindness about 2/3 of the way through, when the doctor's wife becomes the scapegoat for the entire crisis, simply because it's beyond the politicians to deal with multiple state problems without conflating them all.
Despite being the sequel to Blindness, which was an extraordinary book, Seeing is not equally irresistible. The satire was too often just depressing. So I guess it was effective? Just not a lot of fun.
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LibraryThing member SirRoger
A bald satire of governmental bodies and their wild, erroneous inefficiency, Seeing is in turns funny, inspiring, mystical, and a bit devastating. Without any prior organization, 87% of the voters of the fictional country (Portugal) cast a blank vote at the presidential election. The government,
The absence of paragraph breaks for dialogue and the frequent use of commas where periods are expected make the text run on and on in a way that takes some getting used to. It does not, strangely enough, hinder the storytelling, but in fact propels it onward. Every now and then I had to double check to see who was speaking, but on the whole, I felt that this strange method of punctuation actually helped me as a reader to experience the story swath by swath instead of line by line, or word by word.
Nevertheless, I still felt that the story was unnecessarily disjointed. It didn't seem to know for sure where it was going, and it seemed to allude too much to the earlier book, Blindness. An interesting read, but I can't give it more than 3 stars.
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convinced there must be a conspiracy, removes itself from the city, leaving the citizens (traitors? conspirators? insurgents? ingrates?) to fend for themselves under a state of siege. An awkward series of events follows as the various government ministers attempt to solve the problem, (as they see it) while only bringing more pain and suffering upon the people, who all the while act calmly and normally. The absence of paragraph breaks for dialogue and the frequent use of commas where periods are expected make the text run on and on in a way that takes some getting used to. It does not, strangely enough, hinder the storytelling, but in fact propels it onward. Every now and then I had to double check to see who was speaking, but on the whole, I felt that this strange method of punctuation actually helped me as a reader to experience the story swath by swath instead of line by line, or word by word.
Nevertheless, I still felt that the story was unnecessarily disjointed. It didn't seem to know for sure where it was going, and it seemed to allude too much to the earlier book, Blindness. An interesting read, but I can't give it more than 3 stars.
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LibraryThing member pidgeon92
A stunning novel, beautifully written and translated.
LibraryThing member ocgreg34
On election day in an unnamed capital city, rain pours down beginning in the early morning hours and continues well into the afternoon, a cause of concern for those working at the polls. Will anyone bother to show up during the deluge? Should the election be postponed? Under the orders of the
In their bewilderment, the government does everything it can to figure out what's happening: sending spies out among the citizens, questioning and imprisoning those who case blank ballots, declaring a state of siege, imposing a curfew. When nothing seems to work, the government pulls up stakes and flees the city.
But in their determination to lay blame on someone for this show of rebellion, the prime minister learns of a woman who, during a mysterious bout of blindness which affected the entire country, somehow managed not to suffer the same blindness. She must be behind the mass blank balloting, and the prime minister sets out to discredit her.
--
When I first picked up this sequel to José Saramago's "Blindness", I wondered if it was necessary to have read "Blindness" in order to follow along in "Seeing". The story in the latter took place four years after the plague of white blindness, but only vague references were made to that first story. Yet, about two-thirds through, the main group of characters -- the survivors -- all appear, switching the focus of the story. But, surprisingly, I didn't think it necessary to have read the first book. The majority of characters in Seeing who may have been present during the blindness of the first book, don't know what happened to the group of survivors, and this "blindness" of sorts allows the reader understand the government's motives a bit more.
At it's most effective, "Seeing" tells a tale of how humans react to change. On one end of the spectrum, Saramago provides a satirical view of a government taking things to the extreme, of overreacting to a possible change of public opinion rather than attempting to understand what caused the change. The fear of losing control overrides logic, as in the case of the prime minister who needs to find a single person to blame for something out of his control -- in this case, resulting in very dire circumstances. At the opposite end, those remaining in the capital go on with their lives. A strike by the street cleaners is thwarted by the many housewives who take to the street with brooms to clean their own patches of the city. When those who didn't cast blank ballots are forced into returning to the capital, believing that their apartments and omes have been looted (thanks to government broadcasts), they are welcomed back by those who remained in the city and shown that everything is as they left it. Two very different reactions and outcomes to the same events: fear on the one hand, which doesn't allow for moving forward, and acceptance on the other.
I've now read three novels by Nobel laureate José Saramago, and two things stand out in each of them. First, one paragraph may last for four to five pages, mixing dialogue from more than two people and throwing in the author's own commentary. Surprisingly, it sounds more daunting than it actually is. I did find myself paying closer attention to the words in order to determine who was speaking, but looking back, I remember more of the story. Maybe it's just me....
Second, something mysterious seems to spark the story into action, and the origins are never explained. In "Blindness" -- the novel preceeding Seeing -- the entire country develops a strange white blindness; in "The Stone Raft", the Iberian Peninsula mysteriously separates from the rest of Europe and floats away. for those two novels, the mysterous works because those events aren't the main focus of the stories; the stories are more about how the characters react and survive under unknown circumstances. In Seeing, it's almost the same thing with the populace suddenly arriving en masse to vote, the procession of unmanned houselights that follows the government as it leaves the city. Even members of the government comment that something unnatural maybe happening, but by the end of the story, it's never explained. And to me, this was the one story in which that explanation felt necessary because it was alluded to so much by many characters.
"Seeing" is a fine book to read, and I highly recommend both it and its precursor, "Blindness".
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government, the polls remain open, and finally, toward late afternoon, hundreds of people throng to the polling stations and cast their ballots. The government should be happy with the unprecedented show of national pride, but when the ballots are counted, more than 70% are blank.In their bewilderment, the government does everything it can to figure out what's happening: sending spies out among the citizens, questioning and imprisoning those who case blank ballots, declaring a state of siege, imposing a curfew. When nothing seems to work, the government pulls up stakes and flees the city.
But in their determination to lay blame on someone for this show of rebellion, the prime minister learns of a woman who, during a mysterious bout of blindness which affected the entire country, somehow managed not to suffer the same blindness. She must be behind the mass blank balloting, and the prime minister sets out to discredit her.
--
When I first picked up this sequel to José Saramago's "Blindness", I wondered if it was necessary to have read "Blindness" in order to follow along in "Seeing". The story in the latter took place four years after the plague of white blindness, but only vague references were made to that first story. Yet, about two-thirds through, the main group of characters -- the survivors -- all appear, switching the focus of the story. But, surprisingly, I didn't think it necessary to have read the first book. The majority of characters in Seeing who may have been present during the blindness of the first book, don't know what happened to the group of survivors, and this "blindness" of sorts allows the reader understand the government's motives a bit more.
At it's most effective, "Seeing" tells a tale of how humans react to change. On one end of the spectrum, Saramago provides a satirical view of a government taking things to the extreme, of overreacting to a possible change of public opinion rather than attempting to understand what caused the change. The fear of losing control overrides logic, as in the case of the prime minister who needs to find a single person to blame for something out of his control -- in this case, resulting in very dire circumstances. At the opposite end, those remaining in the capital go on with their lives. A strike by the street cleaners is thwarted by the many housewives who take to the street with brooms to clean their own patches of the city. When those who didn't cast blank ballots are forced into returning to the capital, believing that their apartments and omes have been looted (thanks to government broadcasts), they are welcomed back by those who remained in the city and shown that everything is as they left it. Two very different reactions and outcomes to the same events: fear on the one hand, which doesn't allow for moving forward, and acceptance on the other.
I've now read three novels by Nobel laureate José Saramago, and two things stand out in each of them. First, one paragraph may last for four to five pages, mixing dialogue from more than two people and throwing in the author's own commentary. Surprisingly, it sounds more daunting than it actually is. I did find myself paying closer attention to the words in order to determine who was speaking, but looking back, I remember more of the story. Maybe it's just me....
Second, something mysterious seems to spark the story into action, and the origins are never explained. In "Blindness" -- the novel preceeding Seeing -- the entire country develops a strange white blindness; in "The Stone Raft", the Iberian Peninsula mysteriously separates from the rest of Europe and floats away. for those two novels, the mysterous works because those events aren't the main focus of the stories; the stories are more about how the characters react and survive under unknown circumstances. In Seeing, it's almost the same thing with the populace suddenly arriving en masse to vote, the procession of unmanned houselights that follows the government as it leaves the city. Even members of the government comment that something unnatural maybe happening, but by the end of the story, it's never explained. And to me, this was the one story in which that explanation felt necessary because it was alluded to so much by many characters.
"Seeing" is a fine book to read, and I highly recommend both it and its precursor, "Blindness".
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LibraryThing member Trotsky731
Chilling, but brilliant. A modern day 1984. The book is somewhat divided into two parts. The first tells the tale of a rogue capital city of an unnamed country, that decides to cast blank ballots during an election. The government responds in crisis mode and puts the city in a state of siege. The
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government then decides to leave the city to its own devices and moves the government elsewhere. The book then switches to the tale of a police superintendent sent into the city to examine the claims that a woman who did not go blind during the city's plague of blindness (see Blindness, by Jose Saramago) may be behind the blank ballot plot. The first half paints an almost utopian and optomistic picture of a city that has decided to cast off the shackles of modern government oppression. While the second half reaches deep within the human conscience and the struggle for right and wrong and ultimately ends with a bleak outlook on the corruption and power of government, even in a "free and democratic" society. Show Less
LibraryThing member Ebba
I did not realize at first that this book is a continuation of “Blindness” which I have not yet read.
“Seeing” is a book about how the majority of citizens in the Capital city cast blank votes in an election. The ministers of the government are searching for a reason for this “revolt”
The ministers decide to put the capital under siege and move the government officials, police force and military out of the capital and let the citizens fend for themselves, hoping for chaos. The objective is to get the citizens to beg for the government to come back to them in return of casting proper votes in the next election.
The book leaves you with an eerie feeling about politicians. Who can you trust?
I also found it quite humorous from time to time. One of the first chapters starts like this:
“To the Minister of Defense, a civilian who had never even done his military service, the declaration of a state of emergency seemed pretty small beer, he had wanted a proper, full-blooded state of siege,…..”
“Seeing” is a book about how the majority of citizens in the Capital city cast blank votes in an election. The ministers of the government are searching for a reason for this “revolt”
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and will not stop until they find one.The ministers decide to put the capital under siege and move the government officials, police force and military out of the capital and let the citizens fend for themselves, hoping for chaos. The objective is to get the citizens to beg for the government to come back to them in return of casting proper votes in the next election.
The book leaves you with an eerie feeling about politicians. Who can you trust?
I also found it quite humorous from time to time. One of the first chapters starts like this:
“To the Minister of Defense, a civilian who had never even done his military service, the declaration of a state of emergency seemed pretty small beer, he had wanted a proper, full-blooded state of siege,…..”
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LibraryThing member nigeyb
I read this book shortly after having completed 'Blindness'. 'Seeing' is a sequel to 'Blindness'.
At first there appears to be little to explicitly link the two books. This book's premise is a subconscious revolution whereby the inhabitants of a city start to behave in a curiously collective manner
Like 'Blindness', part of my pleasure in this book was due to Saramago's unusual and distinctive narrative style. Again, there are no quotation marks for dialogue, and many long sentences which frequently have a "stream of consciousness" quality. Characters are never identified by their proper names. Despite this the book is easy to follow.
It took me about 100 pages to really get into this book. It's at around the 100 page mark that the book shifts from being focussed on the government's reaction to the blank votes, to a story involving the main characters from 'Blindness' and some undercover policemen. The book became more absorbing and compelling from this moment.
Saramago poses profound questions whilst providing plenty of his deadpan, wry humour mainly at the expense of hierarchy and bureaucracy. The book holds up a mirror to the modern democratic process; the farcical nature of hierarchy; political "spin"; and the corruption that inevitably accompanies power. The book becomes more unsettling and disturbing as it reaches its conclusion. That said, there is also a positive message around personal choice and redemption. By the end there is much to ponder, and I think the book would make an excellent choice for a book group to discuss. This is a challenging and original political and sociological satire. Well worth reading.
At first there appears to be little to explicitly link the two books. This book's premise is a subconscious revolution whereby the inhabitants of a city start to behave in a curiously collective manner
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- 83% of them cast a blank ballot at a general election. This inevitably creates confusion and panic within the government. Like 'Blindness', part of my pleasure in this book was due to Saramago's unusual and distinctive narrative style. Again, there are no quotation marks for dialogue, and many long sentences which frequently have a "stream of consciousness" quality. Characters are never identified by their proper names. Despite this the book is easy to follow.
It took me about 100 pages to really get into this book. It's at around the 100 page mark that the book shifts from being focussed on the government's reaction to the blank votes, to a story involving the main characters from 'Blindness' and some undercover policemen. The book became more absorbing and compelling from this moment.
Saramago poses profound questions whilst providing plenty of his deadpan, wry humour mainly at the expense of hierarchy and bureaucracy. The book holds up a mirror to the modern democratic process; the farcical nature of hierarchy; political "spin"; and the corruption that inevitably accompanies power. The book becomes more unsettling and disturbing as it reaches its conclusion. That said, there is also a positive message around personal choice and redemption. By the end there is much to ponder, and I think the book would make an excellent choice for a book group to discuss. This is a challenging and original political and sociological satire. Well worth reading.
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LibraryThing member Charon07
A "sequel," if you will, to Blindness. It started out as an apparently light-hearted and wry political satire, then turned much darker, until the ending, which was like a punch in the stomach.
LibraryThing member Voise15
Biting satire on our obsession with democracy at all costs. Unique prose style makes it a hard work to engage, but satisfying if you stick with it.
LibraryThing member stillatim
I wasn't too keen on 'Blindness' because almost all of it was so very, very po-faced. Thankfully, 'Seeing' starts out with a hundred pages or so of humor at the expense of politicians everywhere, which might be low-hanging fruit, but low hanging-fruit can still be nourishing, as Saramago might
'Blindness' was also hampered by its slightly silly 'existentialism,' whereas 'Seeing' is a much more concrete novel of ideas. In B, we're asked to imagine what happens when a country's citizens go blind for no reason whatsoever, and then recover (i.e., Violence and the Descent to The State of Nature); in S we're asked to imagine what would happen if those citizens decided to cast only blank ballots in an election. The answer is much more compelling and interesting: machinations, fear, and actual evil. Whereas B seemed much more keen on showing how the inexplicable is terrifying, 'Seeing' suggests, more interestingly, that the inexplicable is far too often used for entirely explicable purposes, viz., to take or retain power: "the incomprehensible can be merely an object of scorn, but not if there is always a way of using it as a pretext."
Otherwise, the style is similar to that of B, and there's a bit more self-reflexivity ("... and here we have further proof of hte limited range and structural weakness of all sarcastic remarks... parodies, satires and other such jokes with which people hope to wound a government, the state of siege was not lifted.") There are charming attacks on media coverage of political events and the police force.
Unfortunately it all gets a bit dull in the middle third; once Saramago focuses in on one character (the police superintendent) the satire dulls. On the upside, this is a great book to point to whenever someone says 'fiction has to focus on individual people' or similar nonsense. Fiction can focus on whatever it wants; here, that means broad social observation and the logic of political power.
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himself have jokingly said. 'Blindness' was also hampered by its slightly silly 'existentialism,' whereas 'Seeing' is a much more concrete novel of ideas. In B, we're asked to imagine what happens when a country's citizens go blind for no reason whatsoever, and then recover (i.e., Violence and the Descent to The State of Nature); in S we're asked to imagine what would happen if those citizens decided to cast only blank ballots in an election. The answer is much more compelling and interesting: machinations, fear, and actual evil. Whereas B seemed much more keen on showing how the inexplicable is terrifying, 'Seeing' suggests, more interestingly, that the inexplicable is far too often used for entirely explicable purposes, viz., to take or retain power: "the incomprehensible can be merely an object of scorn, but not if there is always a way of using it as a pretext."
Otherwise, the style is similar to that of B, and there's a bit more self-reflexivity ("... and here we have further proof of hte limited range and structural weakness of all sarcastic remarks... parodies, satires and other such jokes with which people hope to wound a government, the state of siege was not lifted.") There are charming attacks on media coverage of political events and the police force.
Unfortunately it all gets a bit dull in the middle third; once Saramago focuses in on one character (the police superintendent) the satire dulls. On the upside, this is a great book to point to whenever someone says 'fiction has to focus on individual people' or similar nonsense. Fiction can focus on whatever it wants; here, that means broad social observation and the logic of political power.
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LibraryThing member devilwrites
The premise: ganked from BN.com: On election day in the capital, it is raining so hard that no one has bothered to come out to vote. The politicians are growing jittery. Should they reschedule the elections for another day? Around three o’clock, the rain finally stops. Promptly at four, voters
But when the ballots are counted, more than 70 percent are blank. The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that hit the city four years before, and of the one woman who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? A police superintendent is put on the case.
What begins as a satire on governments and the sometimes dubious efficacy of the democratic system turns into something far more sinister.
Review style: I didn't finish this, so no spoilers. Rather, I'll talk about the reasons I quit, and then discuss the possibility of me picking it up again. No spoilers, no LJ cut.
First, there's the premise. At first it seems really intriguing, but in hindsight, I keep asking myself why I bothered. I don't want to read a book about a government collapsing into its own worst nightmare, because it just reaffirms my already negative conceptions about government and politics, so the book doesn't become enlightening, it just pisses me off. Sure, there's the promise of getting characters we know from Blindness, but that leads into the second problem:
It takes too long to happen. Okay, okay, I only made it through 43 pages. But whereas Blindness started out with a specific person with a specific problem and kept the story VERY tight, Seeing opens up too big: too many people, to grand a concept (election day), with no one person to focus on or care about. Why should I care about what starts out as a zero turn-out day for an election? Sure, it's cool when everyone shows up at the same time and casts blank ballots, but instead of moving on, the story repeats itself because the government demands a recount.
Trust me when I say it's not exciting at all. And Saramago continues the same "lack of proper grammar and punctuation" style he uses in Blindness. No quotation marks, few paragraph breaks, and NO CHARACTER NAMES. In Blindness, the latter worked because regardless, we had distinct descriptions: the first blind man, the first blind man's wife, the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with the dark glasses, the boy with the squint, etc. Here, we have descriptions that are, to my eyes, far less distinctive: party names are p.t.o.l, p.t.o.r., and p.i.t.m., which immediately makes my eyes glaze over. Maybe these initials are more intuitive to readers outside of the US, but the only thing I took out of this was left, right, and middle (all based on the last letter), and I was still yawning. Then you've got clerks, presiding officer of polling station fourteen, and so on and so forth. In Blindness, the descriptors painted characters that acted both as an "every(wo)man" as well as individuals (girl with the DARK glasses, boy with the SQUINT), whereas here? They're boring titles that are too easy for me to ignore.
In the 43 pages I read, I got nothing but government officials. And it's pretty clear from the start the government's going downhill, and I don't want to see that from the POV of the government, I really don't. I stopped reading and asked myself if I really wanted to continue, so I did my research: looked for book summaries and read reviews and peaked at the end of the book. All I'm gonna say is this: I don't like, AT ALL, what I saw. plans of finishing this, so she can tell me for sure, but I have a very bad feeling that this sequel is going to ruin Blindness for me, and I don't want that.
And the style breaks my heart. I know for a fact that Saramago doesn't write this way for every book, but in Blindness, it was such a perfect decision. Here's what I said about it then: I heard that Saramago uses this same technique with his other books. Kind of a shame, because at least here, writing about a group of people who've lost their sight, the formatting is almost an imitation. Who needs to follow proper grammar and formatting when you can't see it anyway? It's kind of poetic like that, and while I have no idea if that was Saramago's intention (the English is a translation), it's a lovely thought to entertain.
Here, the style, no matter how rhythmic the language nor the beauty of the images, the style starts to smack of elitism, of a writer who's too good to follow the rules and this is his way of sticking it to the standard. I've heard it said that Saramago's style is perfect because it slows the reader down and forces the reader to pay attention (which I don't mind, and I'll admit I might not be in the right frame of mind to deal with this style right now), but more importantly, he writes as people process life. We don't have paragraph breaks or quotation marks, and often, we don't even have names when we interact with strangers. It's a good argument, but not one I want to deal with right now.
My Rating
Couldn't Finish It: like I said, I may come back to this. It thoroughly depends on 's reaction to the book. If anyone can convince me to give this another chance, it's her, but I'll have to be in the RIGHT mood to read it, that's for damn sure. Because the style demands a lot out of its reader, and normally, such styles make me pissy, so I'm happy to allow that I may just not be in the mood for this book.
That said, the story worries me. It worries me a lot, especially if it ends like I think it will. I'm not sure it'll be worth picking back up if it ends the way I think it does, and frankly, I've got too much else to read to bother with a book that's going to tick me off. Blindness is a beautiful piece of work which I highly recommend to literary (and literary SF) enthusiasts, and I haven't sworn off Saramago forever either. I've heard very good things about his The Stone Raft, so I may give that a shot, and he's got some GORGEOUS covers too, notably for Death With Interruptions and The Double. However, this is one author who I can't allow to seduce me with covers. I'm going to have to hear VERY convincing things from other readers I trust before I invest in another Saramago book. I don't want another Seeing on my hands. Not ever. :-/
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rush to the polling stations, as if they had been ordered to appear.But when the ballots are counted, more than 70 percent are blank. The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that hit the city four years before, and of the one woman who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? A police superintendent is put on the case.
What begins as a satire on governments and the sometimes dubious efficacy of the democratic system turns into something far more sinister.
Review style: I didn't finish this, so no spoilers. Rather, I'll talk about the reasons I quit, and then discuss the possibility of me picking it up again. No spoilers, no LJ cut.
First, there's the premise. At first it seems really intriguing, but in hindsight, I keep asking myself why I bothered. I don't want to read a book about a government collapsing into its own worst nightmare, because it just reaffirms my already negative conceptions about government and politics, so the book doesn't become enlightening, it just pisses me off. Sure, there's the promise of getting characters we know from Blindness, but that leads into the second problem:
It takes too long to happen. Okay, okay, I only made it through 43 pages. But whereas Blindness started out with a specific person with a specific problem and kept the story VERY tight, Seeing opens up too big: too many people, to grand a concept (election day), with no one person to focus on or care about. Why should I care about what starts out as a zero turn-out day for an election? Sure, it's cool when everyone shows up at the same time and casts blank ballots, but instead of moving on, the story repeats itself because the government demands a recount.
Trust me when I say it's not exciting at all. And Saramago continues the same "lack of proper grammar and punctuation" style he uses in Blindness. No quotation marks, few paragraph breaks, and NO CHARACTER NAMES. In Blindness, the latter worked because regardless, we had distinct descriptions: the first blind man, the first blind man's wife, the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with the dark glasses, the boy with the squint, etc. Here, we have descriptions that are, to my eyes, far less distinctive: party names are p.t.o.l, p.t.o.r., and p.i.t.m., which immediately makes my eyes glaze over. Maybe these initials are more intuitive to readers outside of the US, but the only thing I took out of this was left, right, and middle (all based on the last letter), and I was still yawning. Then you've got clerks, presiding officer of polling station fourteen, and so on and so forth. In Blindness, the descriptors painted characters that acted both as an "every(wo)man" as well as individuals (girl with the DARK glasses, boy with the SQUINT), whereas here? They're boring titles that are too easy for me to ignore.
In the 43 pages I read, I got nothing but government officials. And it's pretty clear from the start the government's going downhill, and I don't want to see that from the POV of the government, I really don't. I stopped reading and asked myself if I really wanted to continue, so I did my research: looked for book summaries and read reviews and peaked at the end of the book. All I'm gonna say is this: I don't like, AT ALL, what I saw. plans of finishing this, so she can tell me for sure, but I have a very bad feeling that this sequel is going to ruin Blindness for me, and I don't want that.
And the style breaks my heart. I know for a fact that Saramago doesn't write this way for every book, but in Blindness, it was such a perfect decision. Here's what I said about it then: I heard that Saramago uses this same technique with his other books. Kind of a shame, because at least here, writing about a group of people who've lost their sight, the formatting is almost an imitation. Who needs to follow proper grammar and formatting when you can't see it anyway? It's kind of poetic like that, and while I have no idea if that was Saramago's intention (the English is a translation), it's a lovely thought to entertain.
Here, the style, no matter how rhythmic the language nor the beauty of the images, the style starts to smack of elitism, of a writer who's too good to follow the rules and this is his way of sticking it to the standard. I've heard it said that Saramago's style is perfect because it slows the reader down and forces the reader to pay attention (which I don't mind, and I'll admit I might not be in the right frame of mind to deal with this style right now), but more importantly, he writes as people process life. We don't have paragraph breaks or quotation marks, and often, we don't even have names when we interact with strangers. It's a good argument, but not one I want to deal with right now.
My Rating
Couldn't Finish It: like I said, I may come back to this. It thoroughly depends on 's reaction to the book. If anyone can convince me to give this another chance, it's her, but I'll have to be in the RIGHT mood to read it, that's for damn sure. Because the style demands a lot out of its reader, and normally, such styles make me pissy, so I'm happy to allow that I may just not be in the mood for this book.
That said, the story worries me. It worries me a lot, especially if it ends like I think it will. I'm not sure it'll be worth picking back up if it ends the way I think it does, and frankly, I've got too much else to read to bother with a book that's going to tick me off. Blindness is a beautiful piece of work which I highly recommend to literary (and literary SF) enthusiasts, and I haven't sworn off Saramago forever either. I've heard very good things about his The Stone Raft, so I may give that a shot, and he's got some GORGEOUS covers too, notably for Death With Interruptions and The Double. However, this is one author who I can't allow to seduce me with covers. I'm going to have to hear VERY convincing things from other readers I trust before I invest in another Saramago book. I don't want another Seeing on my hands. Not ever. :-/
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LibraryThing member Laine-Cunningham
I read this because I enjoyed Blindness so much. This one turned out to be a bit more political than I usually like. However, I enjoyed it quite a bit, in no small part because of the wry humor the author brought to the topic.
LibraryThing member KateSherrod
"...since the citizens of this country were not in the healthy habit of demanding the proper enforcement of the rights bestowed on them by the constitution, it was only logical, even natural, that those rights had been suspended."
Terrifying thought, isn't it? And an eternally fresh and topical one.
Last year, I twisted my mind into a pretzel taking in the odd but absorbing prose style of Jose Saramago's Blindness, and felt that I would never be the same again. And as I finish out this year, achieving my stated goal and then some in terms of number of books read in a year, I here prove that indeed, I am forever changed. Which is nice if you're going to read more Saramago.
Sing hosanna, my mind snapped right back into that pretzel shape. And good thing, too, because if I'd let myself get distracted by the difficulties posed by the prose style, I would have missed one of the most horrifyingly entertaining and terrifyingly funny reads of my life.
As the title might suggest, Seeing* is a sort of antithetical sequel to Blindness, though not strictly in the sense of the continuing adventures of a hero or heroine from the earlier novel. Indeed, the events and truths of Blindness are not even alluded to until rather far into Seeing; there is simply a strong sense that the early crisis here -- a general election held on a bizarrely stormy day not only has a disappointing voter turnout but also results in more than 80% of the cast ballots turning up completely blank -- is the aftermath of an earlier catastrophe, but the contemporary reader could substitute any recent disaster (Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy, say) for the plague of "white blindness."
Unlike the unremitting tragedy and squalor of Blindness, though, Seeing has a pretty wicked satirical bent, especially in the early chapters when the parties on the left, middle and right are squabbling over for which party/candidate all those blank votes are "really" for, and government ministers are trying to come up with a solution to this crisis. One feels in their deliberations, in which the suspension of every civil liberty that First World citizens cherish is at least considered, one by one, echoes of the kind of panicky calculation and hapless cruelty that led to all of the white blindness victims' being herded into a disused mental hospital and left to fend for their helpless selves in Blindness, but here it's all taken much further. And the reader learns an important thing: Saramago is funny.
And yes, it's all but impossible, as matters escalate, to read Seeing without thinking of the Arab Spring, as what started as simply a casting of blank ballots develops into full-scale Gandhiesque passive civil disobedience and the government, for its part, makes an un-Arab-Spring decision to simply withdraw its services. No confidence in us, the officials seem to say? Fine. We have no confidence in you, either. Enjoy your lack of services. As an alternative to mass slaughter, it makes me wistful, that decision. But then things get silly, in a scary way (or possibly scary, in a silly way) when the government-in-exile basically just comes around to treating the "rebel" populace of the capital city pretty much exactly the same way it treated the disease victims in Blindness; this subversion is an infection that must be quarantined, but it would be heartless not to poke food in at them once in a while, wouldn't it?
And again, all of these vicious and brilliant insights into the nature of government and the responsibilities of citizenship, into the way people generally treat each other and into the way they could if only they would keep to their principles (ah, me), are delivered in Saramago's crazy and yet perfectly lucid** prose style. I don't know how he does it, you guys. Again, no dialogue tags or quotation marks, hell, not even any proper names, but the reader still winds up with a perfect insight into who all the characters are as individuals (even though they are known by only the most generic of referents) to the point where she can tell who is speaking even from just a fragment of dialogue. The only other writer I've seen come close to pulling this off is Theodore "Godbody" Sturgeon. But he broke everybody off into point-of-view chapters.
So in the end, Seeing feels rather a lot like a lost J.G. Ballard apocalypse, one in which the world is poised to end, not with a rush of wind or water or a crystallization or a drought, but with a refusal to participate, with apathy. Which, given Ballard's style of apocalyptic heroes, is very Ballardian indeed!
And on a purely personal note, oh, could I sympathize with those elected officials who had this crisis dumped into their laps. "The biggest mistake I made in my political life was letting them sit me down in this chair," the president says at one point. When I was a member of my home town's town council in 2001-2004, I said the same thing. All the damned time. Less so his next remark "I didn't realize at the time that the arms of this chair had handcuffs on them." But sometimes I did. Sometimes, I did.
*Ensayo Sobre la Lucidez in the original Portuguese. Portuguese isn't my best language, but I muddle through okay (not for a whole novel yet!) and so I get "Essay Concerning Sight" as a more literal translation. I guess I can see how that "essay" might throw an English-speaking reader, mislead him or her into expecting non-fiction, but remember that the word "essay" originally meant something more tentative, an attempt, the thought conveyed being that someone is playing with an idea rather than making declarations about it. And since this book is, in part, exploring the consequences of the prior novel's "white blindness", I like the "what if" quality the original Portuguese title suggests to me. But, you know, marketing.
**This despite some of the most convoluted sets of mixed metaphors I've ever encountered. But people do talk that way, especially when they're excited. How mimetic. Or something. Also, I read this book via my Kindle, as part of a single file that contains the Collected Works of Jose Saramago. I thus never had any idea how close I was to the end of the book, as the "percent completed" indicator stayed at the same number for chapters and chapters. With a dead tree book (which is how I read Blindness) there was a physical cue that the end was approaching. With an ebook as one of a single file of collected works, the ending sneaks right up on one and there is trauma. Aaah! This is, though, my only quibble with ebook reading so far.
Terrifying thought, isn't it? And an eternally fresh and topical one.
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And this is not some talking head pundit on one of the opinewz channels that infest American TV, but a Portuguese Nobel laureate describing the immediate aftermath of one of the most farcically awful political crises he could imagine for a proud Western democracy. And there's more, so much more, of this where that came from.Last year, I twisted my mind into a pretzel taking in the odd but absorbing prose style of Jose Saramago's Blindness, and felt that I would never be the same again. And as I finish out this year, achieving my stated goal and then some in terms of number of books read in a year, I here prove that indeed, I am forever changed. Which is nice if you're going to read more Saramago.
Sing hosanna, my mind snapped right back into that pretzel shape. And good thing, too, because if I'd let myself get distracted by the difficulties posed by the prose style, I would have missed one of the most horrifyingly entertaining and terrifyingly funny reads of my life.
As the title might suggest, Seeing* is a sort of antithetical sequel to Blindness, though not strictly in the sense of the continuing adventures of a hero or heroine from the earlier novel. Indeed, the events and truths of Blindness are not even alluded to until rather far into Seeing; there is simply a strong sense that the early crisis here -- a general election held on a bizarrely stormy day not only has a disappointing voter turnout but also results in more than 80% of the cast ballots turning up completely blank -- is the aftermath of an earlier catastrophe, but the contemporary reader could substitute any recent disaster (Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy, say) for the plague of "white blindness."
Unlike the unremitting tragedy and squalor of Blindness, though, Seeing has a pretty wicked satirical bent, especially in the early chapters when the parties on the left, middle and right are squabbling over for which party/candidate all those blank votes are "really" for, and government ministers are trying to come up with a solution to this crisis. One feels in their deliberations, in which the suspension of every civil liberty that First World citizens cherish is at least considered, one by one, echoes of the kind of panicky calculation and hapless cruelty that led to all of the white blindness victims' being herded into a disused mental hospital and left to fend for their helpless selves in Blindness, but here it's all taken much further. And the reader learns an important thing: Saramago is funny.
And yes, it's all but impossible, as matters escalate, to read Seeing without thinking of the Arab Spring, as what started as simply a casting of blank ballots develops into full-scale Gandhiesque passive civil disobedience and the government, for its part, makes an un-Arab-Spring decision to simply withdraw its services. No confidence in us, the officials seem to say? Fine. We have no confidence in you, either. Enjoy your lack of services. As an alternative to mass slaughter, it makes me wistful, that decision. But then things get silly, in a scary way (or possibly scary, in a silly way) when the government-in-exile basically just comes around to treating the "rebel" populace of the capital city pretty much exactly the same way it treated the disease victims in Blindness; this subversion is an infection that must be quarantined, but it would be heartless not to poke food in at them once in a while, wouldn't it?
And again, all of these vicious and brilliant insights into the nature of government and the responsibilities of citizenship, into the way people generally treat each other and into the way they could if only they would keep to their principles (ah, me), are delivered in Saramago's crazy and yet perfectly lucid** prose style. I don't know how he does it, you guys. Again, no dialogue tags or quotation marks, hell, not even any proper names, but the reader still winds up with a perfect insight into who all the characters are as individuals (even though they are known by only the most generic of referents) to the point where she can tell who is speaking even from just a fragment of dialogue. The only other writer I've seen come close to pulling this off is Theodore "Godbody" Sturgeon. But he broke everybody off into point-of-view chapters.
So in the end, Seeing feels rather a lot like a lost J.G. Ballard apocalypse, one in which the world is poised to end, not with a rush of wind or water or a crystallization or a drought, but with a refusal to participate, with apathy. Which, given Ballard's style of apocalyptic heroes, is very Ballardian indeed!
And on a purely personal note, oh, could I sympathize with those elected officials who had this crisis dumped into their laps. "The biggest mistake I made in my political life was letting them sit me down in this chair," the president says at one point. When I was a member of my home town's town council in 2001-2004, I said the same thing. All the damned time. Less so his next remark "I didn't realize at the time that the arms of this chair had handcuffs on them." But sometimes I did. Sometimes, I did.
*Ensayo Sobre la Lucidez in the original Portuguese. Portuguese isn't my best language, but I muddle through okay (not for a whole novel yet!) and so I get "Essay Concerning Sight" as a more literal translation. I guess I can see how that "essay" might throw an English-speaking reader, mislead him or her into expecting non-fiction, but remember that the word "essay" originally meant something more tentative, an attempt, the thought conveyed being that someone is playing with an idea rather than making declarations about it. And since this book is, in part, exploring the consequences of the prior novel's "white blindness", I like the "what if" quality the original Portuguese title suggests to me. But, you know, marketing.
**This despite some of the most convoluted sets of mixed metaphors I've ever encountered. But people do talk that way, especially when they're excited. How mimetic. Or something. Also, I read this book via my Kindle, as part of a single file that contains the Collected Works of Jose Saramago. I thus never had any idea how close I was to the end of the book, as the "percent completed" indicator stayed at the same number for chapters and chapters. With a dead tree book (which is how I read Blindness) there was a physical cue that the end was approaching. With an ebook as one of a single file of collected works, the ending sneaks right up on one and there is trauma. Aaah! This is, though, my only quibble with ebook reading so far.
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LibraryThing member kirstiecat
This book is brilliant...although it is technically the sequel to Blindness, it doesn't revisit those characters until near the end so it is possible to read this without reading the other, though I would recommend reading Blindness first. This book is not about disease so much as about governments
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and control. As in Blindness, Saramago leaves it open as to which country this takes place in. I think this makes it even more terrifying, to be honest. The premise of this book is based on the initial voting incident in which the majority of the population casts blank votes. That means that they actually showed up to cast a blank ballot...the government has no idea what to do or how to interpret it. Though it seems like a brilliant way to protest, I'd gather that Saramago disagrees when he writes about the outcome. Brings to mind a certain Super Furry Animals song.... Show Less
LibraryThing member librken
A horribly wonderful book. A very depressing, cynical look at modern European politics. I kept wondering why it was called a sequel of sorts to Blindness, but finally it becomes clear. If you are a Saramago fan as I am, make sure you read Blindness first for some added depth to the end of the book.
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You don't have to, but the end of the book will mean much more if you do. Show Less
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