Drop Everything! *Thud*

Jose Saramago’s Seeing makes no attempt to directly follow the genius that was Blindness. If it had, it would have, in all likelihood, failed miserably. But with a master’s intuition and prudence, Saramago gave the first space to breathe, letting the second speak for itself until the two collide with terrifying, breathtaking violence.

I find the near-identical cover designs for the two absolutely fascinating. The only main difference is the inversion of color between them. The symbolism inherent in that visual is alive and well in the books: Seeing tends initially toward a more lighthearted, satirical veneer, a brighter picture of society. Gradually, though, the persevering strength that the city’s people at first appear to possess after overcoming the events of Blindness begins to falter, and the atrocities of human nature are again unmasked by a catastrophe of quite a different order.

On a torrentially rainy early morning, the staff of a polling center sit around the ballot box and talk. They cast their votes. They wait. It gets later, then later still. No one else arrives. They call their families, they call the other polling places, seeking absent reassurance. People trickle in, still in abnormally halting fits and starts.

Then, at four in the afternoon, people begin to pour into the streets, bombarding the polling places. There is no immediately apparent reason for this sudden amassing of people. The staff are too relieved that anyone showed up at all to register with more than the most perfunctory concern the profound oddity of such a situation. The lines dissipate, the polls close, the votes are counted.

More than seventy percent of the ballots are blank.

The polling is repeated. This time eighty-three percent of the votes come back unmarked.

This is the rather interesting situation in which the (still-unnamed, as are the characters, though it is once postulated in one of Saramago’s narrative digressions that, purely hypothetically of course, the country in question just might be his native Portugal) country’s government finds itself. The situation escalates to epic proportions, with protesters wearing buttons and carrying banners that proudly proclaim, “I cast a blank vote,” and marching on the president’s mansion. It’s all entirely nonviolent, but quite enough to put the fear of god into the government’s hearts, and they flee the errant city to the surrounding countryside.

The book is full of Saramago’s characteristic meanderings and asides that, coming from any other author, would seem very strange—if not downright annoying—but from him are welcome and fascinating breaks from his unrelenting, intense narratives. The narrative of Seeing doesn’t even approach the horror, the commentary on human nature, the repulsing beauty, that Blindness’s did, but in its own way it keeps the focus tight, the narrative thread stretched taut at all times.

So, you’re probably wondering, how is this supposed to connect to Blindness at all? The plot seems entirely unrelated, and it’s set four years after Blindness was. The only connection is that of location.

Ostensibly, yes. But, as the government investigation on the genesis of the blank votes wears on, a member of the party led by “the doctor’s wife” in Blindness makes the tenuous mental leap to surmise that she might be somehow behind the blank votes. (If anyone has read Blindness, play guess the traitor!) Truth be told, the characters I got to know and love in Blindness make little more than cameos in Seeing, but I don’t think it really could have been any other way; as I’ve said before, the respectful distance with which Saramago treated the connection between the two books allowed them each to stand on their own, preventing the mutual reliance that many pairs of books have, which weakens the narrative independence of each. This isn’t to say that Blindness shouldn’t be read before Seeing: it is by far the better of two phenomenal books, and the jarring conclusion of Seeing would be far less so without experience with both books. I simply appreciate how Saramago allowed Seeing to speak for itself, without constantly looking over its shoulder for support.

While several key issues in Seeing are never resolved, that’s a hallmark of Saramago’s work, and to expect a straight answer from him would be slightly crazy. In fact, during one of his musings on writing, he refers to “one of those analytical readers who expects a proper explanation for everything,” later going on to say that “it is difficult to give…an answer likely to satisfy such a reader totally.” While this remark is made within a very specific context, it would easily be applied to any of Saramago’s work, and the many puzzles he proposes within.

It’s not Blindness—but then it never tried to be. While I’m not overly pleased with Saramago right now, that’s for reasons of my own, and he’s still my favorite author, ready with another book full of ups and downs and sadness and anger that I’m glad to feel, because it means he reached me.