“It is an unvarying rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start to think, afterward, it might be too late.”
People who don’t vote are at the heart of Jose Saramago’s Seeing. Well, that’s not strictly accurate. Voters in the nameless city in which the book is set do go to the polls. It’s just that 70% of them cast blank ballots. The powers that be view this as a threat to their legitimacy and authority, but their first action is reasonable: they hold another election. It goes worse: over 80% of the ballots are blank, and now the government is angry and defensive. They pull infrastructure (including police and trash workers) out of the city, and wait for chaos to reign and for the populace to beg for their return. But nothing of the sort happens. So things escalate again.
It doesn’t become obvious that this is a sequel to Blindness until over halfway through. There are a few small references to the epidemic of blindness that happened a few years before the events of the book, but then the government is tipped off that there was one woman who hadn’t ever lost her sight. The doctor’s wife is still alive, still living in the city, still meeting up regularly with her group from the hospital. The government becomes convinced that she led a conspiracy to cast blank votes (or least could be reasonably blamed for it), and a police superintendent and a few colleagues are sent into the city undercover to set her up to take the fall. Her innocence, though, is obvious even to the police superintendent, who finds himself wrestling with the decision of what to do about it.
Blindness was a difficult book, both in content (very bleak) and stylistically (Saramago doesn’t use quotation marks, or much other punctuation, and no one is named). Seeing maintains the style choices, which I did get used to after a while, but doesn’t quite match in tone. In the first half, dealing with the government’s increasingly poisonous infighting and machinations against its populace, is more than anything else a vicious satire. The second half, though, in showing the police superintendent’s initial sense of duty being worn away by his exposure to the real bonds among the group and in particular the trustworthiness of the doctor’s wife, injects an almost hopeful note into the proceedings. Almost, of course, because Saramago’s view of human nature is clearly pretty pessimistic.
I think you could read this without having read Blindness, but will be missing a lot of the context that gives the back half of the novel its power. Neither are books designed for broad appeal: the way he chose to structure his prose renders it sometimes difficult to follow, and they are very dark reads with unpleasant things to say about the way people behave. But I really appreciated both of them. I will say that I thought Blindness was a stronger narrative overall, but Seeing‘s perspective on power at a more macro level, and the way it takes the reader along on the journey of the police superintendent’s feelings are compellingly rendered. If you’re interested, read Blindness first. If you like Blindness, this is a very worthy follow-up.
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