Seeing by José Saramago
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a different kind of book than its predecessor, Blindness. While both books are fairly different, the unifying feature between the two of them has to do with the absence or presence of governance. In Blindness which I have not reviewed, everyone goes blind inexplicably except for one woman, who witnesses the decay of civilization. In Seeing people do not lose their sight, except that the democratic process becomes stilted as most of the ballots that come in are blank. The response of the government is somewhat understandable, it is afraid people do not follow its ideology anymore, and declares a state of emergency. In the process of trying to justify its actions, it digs up the one woman who did not lose her sight so recently ago, and seeks to make a scapegoat of her. The ensuring politics that occurs with the policy and the national government give expression to the major tension in this book.
My main issue with this book is that over half of it has no appropriate tension. The government merely flounders. And yet, in doing so, we see that the titles of these two books could be reversed and in a sense, it ought to be. In the first book, the nameless woman bears witness to the absence of sight, in which all major activity breaks down. Without economic exchange people have no reason to maintain the ties of “normal” society and so it falls apart. In this second book, while people still see, without the absence of government, there is no problem — people live on, they “see” appropriately that their governments panic is excessive to the situation. The government adds nothing and takes nothing away by withdrawing form the city and “punishing” its population.
Saramago’s position is clear, populace is the rule, not some hierarchical edifice that only seeks to further its own existence and continuance. Of which, government is, it seems. Generally the economic take care of itself, although its arguable whether or not the presence of government matters this much one way or another.
I did find the general structure of the book to be cumbersome, having struggled to read it because there seemed to be no real issue for the first half of the book. I’m not sure what Saramago could have done about this; the context is unusual and really important to this work.
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