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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125490 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780156032735
• Condition: USED - LIKE NEW
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From Publishers Weekly
In Nobel Prize–winner Saramogo's best known novel, Blindness, an unnamed capital city experiences a devastating (although transient) epidemic of blindness that mysteriously spares one woman, an eye doctor's wife, who helps a blinded group survive until their sight returns. His new novel, set in the same capital city four years later, depicts a legal "revolution," when 83% of its citizens cast blank ballots in a national election. The president declares a state of siege, but even though soldiers cordon off the city, nothing affects the city's maddening cheerfulness. The president receives an anonymous letter revealing the case of the eye doctor's wife (she and the group she helped had kept her support secret), and the minister in charge of internal security sends undercover policemen to investigate her connection to the "blank" revolution. The allegorical blindness/sight framework is weak and obvious, and Saramago's capital city sometimes reminds one of Dr. Seuss's Whoville. Yet it works: as the novel establishes its figures (the pompous president, tremulous ministers and pantomime detectives), it acquires the momentum of a bedroom (here, cabinet) farce, baldly sending up EU politicos and major media editorialists. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Saramago's sombre masterpiece "Blindness" had an almost mythic power, whereas his latest novel, a political satire set in the same nameless capital city, opens with more wit and less heart. When Election Day coincides with a terrible rainstorm, the government worries that no one will venture out to vote. This fear is unfounded, but the election results are even more alarming: seventy per cent of the city's voters have cast a blank ballot. Saramago has enormous fun imagining the official acrobatics precipitated by this apparent vote of no confidence, and, as the political hypocrisies and bureaucratic absurdities multiply, the narrative hums with correspondences to current events. Initially, readers may miss the previous novel's intensity of feeling, but this one's lightness proves deceptive: for Saramago's beleaguered citizens, even thoughts never uttered can be fatal, and everyone is guilty until otherwise notified.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post
When is a revolution not a revolution? It's a rainy election morning in the city that, only four years earlier, had been afflicted by an epidemic of blindness, and no one has shown up at the polls. Although election officials worry that a boycott is underway, by late afternoon the voters begin to trickle in. Once the ballots are counted, however, more than 70 percent of them are blank. A week later, the election is repeated, with even more alarming results: Now 83 percent of the ballots are blank. Smelling an insurrection, the prime minister and his cabinet go into emergency session. What follows in this, José Saramago's 12th novel, is an often hilarious and sometimes gripping exploration of the inept (but brutal) workings of power, as well as of the almost accidental capacity for heroism of simple men and women.

A sequel to his earlier novel Blindness, Seeing is less explicitly allegorical than its predecessor. In the first novel, as the city's sightless residents descend into thuggery and rape, the blindness of unreason reveals the savagery beneath the crust of civilization. In this novel, blindness is replaced by blankness, a paradoxical form of civil disobedience that does not disturb the peace or break any laws. The people have simply expressed their will not to choose.

From the government's perspective, however, the number of blank ballots amounts to an assault on the foundations of democratic rule -- "a depth charge launched against the system," as the minister of defense puts it. Since neither surveillance nor interrogations get to the bottom of the rebellion, the prime minister declares a state of siege in the city. Soon after, white flags begin to appear everywhere. Normally they would signal capitulation, but in the trompe-l'oeil world of Seeing, the banners betoken yet another act of defiance (in Portuguese, "blank" and "white" are the same word). An even more draconian measure follows: To punish the protesters, the government withdraws from the city, anticipating that chaos will erupt. But no: People go about their business as usual -- and this (paradoxically again) reinforces the government's belief that something is terribly wrong. As one official puts it: "A city like this, with no one in charge, with no government, no securi!

ty, no police, and no one seems to care, there's something very mysterious going on here."

Readers of Saramago will find much here that is familiar: the notion that truth is nothing more than the lies of the powerful; the small, piercing insights into human nature (in one delicious moment, an underling thrills at being allowed to use his boss's toilet); the hard-won wisdom that says life is what it is, but we don't have to like it. As in his other recent novels, Saramago tells the story in massive, sparsely punctuated paragraphs that blend description with dialogue and do not mark off one speaker from the next -- a mode of narration that, as he has pointed out, is meant to be heard rather than read but that sometimes can be disconcerting.

The first two-thirds of Seeing, with its endless councils of craven ministers and aloof bureaucrats, cannot but remind one of Kafka, to whom Saramago has often been compared. (The difference is that Saramago is a lighthearted Kafka, one more likely to make us laugh than grimace.) Yet once we leave the halls of power to follow an anonymous policeman back into the city, Kafka gives way to Capra as the narrative shows us how, in extraordinary times, ordinary people can find within themselves untapped reservoirs of courage. Asked why he refuses to go along with the plan to turn an ophthalmologist's wife into the scapegoat for the blank ballots, the policeman replies with words he read in a book somewhere: "When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf."

Although Saramago's dense, garrulous prose -- masterfully rendered in Margaret Jull Costa's translation -- may not be to everyone's taste, the clarity and compassion of his vision make Seeing worthy of its name and its author.

Reviewed by Gustavo Perez Firmat
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Another first-rate Saramago novel
I thoroughly enjoyed "Seeing," Saramago's latest novel to be translated into English. This is a first-rate addition to the upper tier of his works.

*** Spoiler alert: the following paragraphs reveal a few elements of the plot. ***

In the Nov. 8, 2004, issue of "The American Conservative" magazine, the managing editor, Kara Hopkins, advocated not voting in the pending presidential election. "Silence is a profound expression," she argued, "and enough unraised voices eventually turn even the most partisan heads." "Elections," she contended, "maintain the illusion of opposing parties exchanging ideas rather than political animals competing for power. Selling voting as the ultimate expression of citizenship . . . legitimizes the process that keeps them in control and makes the public docile by enforcing the notion that we rule ourselves."

Whether or not one agrees with Hopkins, she offers a perspective that Saramago might endorse, to judge by "Seeing." In "Seeing," some 70 percent of the residents of the capital of an unnamed country turn in blank ballots in an election, refusing to vote for the Party of the Right, the Party of the Center, or the Party of the Left. The government, dominated by unsavory and unprincipled authoritarians, is horrified that the rituals of democracy have generated a challenge to the government's legitimacy and orders the election to be reheld. But the percentage of blank votes is higher than before.

The government's reaction, though often fumbling, is vicious and lethal. It uses various Orwellian techniques and, as it deems necessary, violence to punish the capital's residents and try to get them to appear to respect the available choices, regardless of their true feelings about the three parties.

This is a fable. It is not intended to be entirely realistic, and the reader must suspend disbelief at times. After all, a modern Western democracy ("Seeing" appears to take place in western Europe) that took Draconian measures against its citizens for refusing to vote would be subject to external pressure and would have to relent. And it would be unlikely to take such measures in the first place. Western democracies are famously tolerant of political dissent--for example, from 1993-1997 Canada tolerated having as the federal government's official opposition party the Bloc Quebecois, whose goal is to separate Quebec from the Canadian federation. But Saramago is so masterly a writer that he makes the implausible possible. The reader does soon ask, "Why would any government that observes the forms of democracy behave this way?" A plot twist that appears in the middle of the novel provides an answer.

In "Seeing," Saramago continues his charming dance with the Portuguese language (I read the book in Portuguese). He narrates events at a languid pace (and occasionally with deceptive calmness by bringing forth a horrible revelation only at the end of an otherwise disarmingly anodyne paragraph). And his characters speak a Portuguese more formal than would be found in much formal writing. People who spoke this way in real life would be seen as affected. But Saramago's use of the King's Portuguese doesn't come across as pretentious; rather, it's a celebration of the outer reaches of classic Portuguese. I often think that Saramago's goal is to restore a full-fledged type of Portuguese that is fading, perhaps thanks to an onslaught of televised Brazilian soap operas and the like. Like Shakespeare, whose facility with language and extraordinary vocabulary altered English forever, Saramago may succeed in elevating Portuguese to a language different from the form that preceded his literary career. That would have to be the supreme achievement of any writer of literature.

Is Seeing Any Less Blind?
In this sequel to Saramago's Nobel winning book "Blindness" the reader is presented with an almost opposite situation. Saramago's books, are political metaphors and commentaries which look deeply into the human spirit and soul.

In his first book, the author helps the reader understand how a world would look if all social stability and government broke down and the populace was left blind and helpless. The picture is very ugly and very painful. Yet, it has a realism that can not be ignored.

"Seeing" asks an instrumental operative question: "Are those who see, less blind than those who don't?" Here Saramago again creates a sociological and political microcosm to illustrate his points. There are many points he makes, but one of his central ones is that citizens can be recognized by "standing up and refusing to be counted." This act seems to those in control as a giant insurrection. Additionally, when people spontaneously choose to make such a statement; what should the government do about it? And they can make it unilaterally, without a movement or a leader, per se.

Saramago also gives the reader an interesting and experimental writing style. He dispenses with much normal grammar, yet rarely does this impede the reader's ability to glean complete understanding, or close to it, of what is happening in the story. Novelistically, the book is extremely well written and engaging.

In many senses, Saramago conveys his feeling that people, events and beliefs can be manipulated. But they can only be manipulated so far. If Saramago is speaking of any specific country, he takes care not to reveal it. He almost jests that he is talking about Portugal, but indicates that this is clearly just to give substance to the contentions of his story, to ground the reader in some basis of mundane reality. Perhaps one imposes the concept on whatever country they live it, because the points Saramago is making are universal. The government can influence the way things happen, how they appear, what is believed and what becomes history. They do have the power to do that, but they do not have the power to control the electorate. And if and when they take things too far, the electorate can stand up and be counted. Change is just around the corner in all Democratic Countries.

This book is recommended to all who want to see the kinds of things that Governments can do when motivated to do so. It is a very educational and impressive book. It is recommended to all people of voting age.

A Brilliant Parable of Democracy Delivered at Gun Point
In the unnamed capital city of an unidentified democratic country, election day morning is marred by torrential rains. Voter turnout is disturbingly low, but the weather breaks by midafternoon and the population heads en masse to their voting stations. The government's relief is short-lived, however, when vote counting reveals that over 70% of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled by this apparent civic lapse, the government gives the citizenry a chance to make amends just one week later with another election day. The results are worse: now 83% of the ballots are blank. The two major political parties - the ruling party of the right (p.o.t.r.) and their chief adversary, the party of the middle (p.o.t.m.) - are in a panic, while the haplessly marginalized party of the left (p.o.t.l.) produces an analysis claiming that the blank ballots are essentially a vote for their progressive agenda. Is this an organized conspiracy to overthrow not just the ruling government but the entire democratic system? If so, who is behind it, and how did they manage to organize hundreds of thousands of people into such subversion without being noticed? When asked how they voted, ordinary citizens simply respond that such information is private, and besides, is not leaving the ballot blank their right?

Thus begins Jose Saramago's brilliant new book, SEEING. The setting is the same unnamed country where, four years earlier, a plague of contagious but temporary "white blindness" afflicted first the capital city, then spread throughout the country. The resulting breakdown of civic institutions and reversion of life to the basest instincts for control and survival were magnificently chronicled in Saramago's earlier novel, BLINDNESS, undoubtedly the author's most powerful and approachable work to that date. The events surrounding that epidemic proved so shameful that the entire country tacitly agreed in the aftermath not to speak of or analyze what happened. Now, however, the blank white ballots bring back haunting memories of the white blindness. Perhaps the citizenry's refusal to cast marked ballots augurs some sort of political epidemic that could spread to the rest of the country.

What makes SEEING such a remarkable work is the picture Saramago draws of a right-wing government under duress, with eerie echoes (intentional or otherwise) of the current Bush Administration's "war on terror" and its imposition of democracy on Iraq. Unsure how to respond to a benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic conspiracy exists, Saramago's ruling government quickly labels the movement "terrorism, pure and unadulterated" and declares a state of emergency, allowing the government "to suspend at a stroke of a pen all constitutional guarantees." Five hundred citizens are seized at random and disappear into secret interrogation sites, and their status is coded red/red for secrecy. Their families are informed in Orwellian style not to worry about the lack of information concerning their loved ones, since "in that very silence lay the key that could guarantee their personal safety." When these moves bear no fruit regarding this "depth charge launched against the stability of the democratic system...of the entire planet," the right wing government adopts a series of increasingly drastic steps, from declaring a state of siege and concocting plots to create disorder to withdrawing the police and seat of government from the capital, sealing the city against all entrances and exits, and finally manufacturing their own terrorist ringleader. The city continues to function near-normally throughout, the people parrying each of the government's thrusts in inexplicable unison and with such a level of nonviolent resistance that they must all be channeling Mahatma Gandhi.

As always, Saramago presents his story in dense, run-on sentences that twist and turn and sparkle like diamonds, to be read and admired for their brilliant cut and the play of light through their many facets. To wit,

-- the media promote "the old game of public virtues masking private vices, the jolly carousel of private vices elevated to the status of public virtues..."

-- "...we will all continue to lie when we tell the truth, and to tell the truth when we lie..."

-- "...since the citizens of this country were not in the healthy habit of demanding proper enforcement of the rights bestowed on them by the constitution, it was only logical, even natural, that they failed even to notice that those rights had been suspended."

-- "...demonstrations never achieve anything, if they did, we wouldn't allow them..."

If Gabriel Garcia Marquez is arguably the world's greatest living writer, Jose Saramago proves once again in SEEING that he is the world's greatest active practitioner of the novel form, and certainly the most deserving Nobelist for Literature in the last decade. SEEING is, in a word, extraordinary. In it, Saramago demonstrates unparalleled mastery of the written word, flashes his low-key but biting satire like a rapier, and reinforces his position as the moral voice of his generation.