Seeing
Ratings11
Average rating3.9
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.
Series
Featured Series
2 primary books#2 in Blindness
Blindness is a 2-book series with 2 primary works first released in 1995 with contributions by José Saramago.
Reviews
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I have never read a book like this. It is weird and has little punctuation. It's about politics but not in a way that describes a certain conflict or a strong cast of characters. But rather it is very abstract, using a party on the left, party on the right and party in the middle. None of the characters have names. They are only described by their title or their relation to others: e.g. the doctor's wife.
The book describes what can happen when the majority of the people legitimately cast a blank vote during elections. It displays a democratic multi-party government as obsolete. What does happen when there is no majority voting for parties. Do riots happen, or does life as usual run its course?
The first 100 pages are filled with conversations between the cabinet members of government, the party leaders and their direct subordinates. Silly debates, and pretentious arguments hold sway for that part of the book. Personally I found this part extremely tedious, and it was only the second try that got me further than page 55.
Conversations are stringed along sentences that can run for half a page, in the way a conversation is directly transcribed. Some conversations can ramble on without even taking place in real life and are just a what-if scenario described by the character that at that moment takes centre stage.
Looking back I might have caught on to the central part of this book earlier on in the book instead of the final stages of it. It's the small conversations that matter in the way that Coen Brother's movies are more about the dialogue than about just the storyline. I was looking for a plot, but found a very flimsy one. I was looking for engaging characters, but found abstract archetypes. However, I did find a very unique writing style and a book I might have to get back to, when I'm wiser and less restless. For that it deserves an extra star to what I initially wanted to give it.
