Seeing

The novel SEEING tells of an electoral crisis in an unnamed country. The voters only showed up at the polling stations in the afternoon after heavy torrential rains. Of the votes or ballots they cast, 70% were blank. Having declared failure of election, the national government called for another election the following week only to find out that 83% of the ballots were blank. The stunned government officials, suspecting that the incident could be some act of terrorism, resorted to desperate measures: they moved out of the capital, isolating it, and declared state of emergency.

In the novel, the government links the electoral crisis to the yet unexplained tragedy of white blindness that plagued the capital four years before (where all but one were affected), which, to this date, still haunts the capital’s inhabitants and embarrasses the government.

I’m glad I read BLINDNESS (4 or 5 years before); otherwise, I wouldn’t have appreciated SEEING the way I do now. I really enjoyed both novels despite the former being so surreal and terrifying and the latter being political. The tricks were to read slowly and getting used to the author’s (Saramago’s) writing style, which is quite obscure.

{12 November 2009)