in an unnamed city, once again Jose Saramago creates an impossible sitiuation in order to write about the human condition.
Jose Saramago was a humble genius, one of the rare few writers who could talk about the trival and mundane and make them seem so magical and important.
As usual, he sets out to explore and joust with preconceived universal truths and every day notions, and exposes them, flips them on their heads, reaffirms familiar and ageold truths because in his own words "But truths need to be repeated many times so that they don't, poor things, lapse into oblivion" and even recalls to my own memory something I read by the controversial novelist and critic John Gardner last year “What the best fiction does is make powerful affirmations of familiar truths.
. . the trivial fiction which times filters out is that which either makes wrong affirmations or else makes affirmations in a squeaky little voice.
If the shoe fits.
This time around in the nameless city,of the population have cast blank votes in an otherwise well run, organised democratic nation, as shown at the beginning of the novel.
This novel acts like an inverted Kafka piece this time the bureaucracy and snivelling politicians are having the nightmare.
The idea explored here, and it is a novel of ideas, is what would happen if democracy failed Casting a blank vote is a perfectly legal thing to do and since the novel has no secret eventuallyrevealed conspirator behind the blank votes other than Saramago himself it is quite clear that it is not important how the masses managed to simultaneously think and act upon the radical action of casting a blank vote.
Saramago is concerned with the aftermath, the ramifications and gives him a unique canvass to paint his wise thoughts onto.
The first half of the novel is bitingly sarcastic as he spends entire chapters attacking goverment protocal, endless illdefined jargon and just seems to have fun trivialising and mocking government hierarchy the powers that be spend unusual amounts of time putting each other in place and correcting each other's words.
This is something Saramago does in all his works that I have read thus far, he is fascinated with linguistics, I mean, how can people lay siege to a city that they are already in
In Blindness, Saramago showed how ordinary people would resort to barbarism when everything failed, this time around it is the government The Interior Minister and his subordinates who act inhumanely spying, imprisonment, interrogation, and more which ends in them evacuating the city, thus leaving the amusingly named "Blankers" to their own ends.
It goes like this, the city's inhabitants get by fine and the government behaves worse and worse,
In typical Saramago style Style is imperfection says Orhan Pamuk in his novel My Name Is Red he writes sentences that run on for large paragraphs, sometimes even entire pages, he only uses commas and full stops, the occasional parentheses,never an exclamtion mark as he is too gentle an author to do that.
The characters are named by their job titles and position within the hierarchy,
"When we are born, when we enter this world," he explains, "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, well, I asked myself that question"
Those are the words uttered by the hero of the novel, who starts off as a specially trained police inflitrator, who goes into the city to find out the cause of the mass blank voting, everyone is baffled and desperate, and they decide to blame the heroine from Saramago's novel Blindness This is a loose sequel of sorts, don't be fooled who kept her sight while everyone else went blind.
It is only after some time that our herothe superintendent ponders and utters those words quoted above that he decides to do the right thing and brings all the information he has collected about the case and the government's plan to scapegoat the woman from the previous disaster to the media who help expose their plans.
There isn't really a resolution to the story in any conventional storytelling fashion, and it's worth noting that the original titles for this novel and blindness translated literally into english would be "An Essay On Blindness and An Essay On Seeing"
I'd recommend this novel to anyone who loves language, disgressions on just about all the usual worldly topics that Saramago talks about, and all the metaphysical and philosophical questions that he asks and ponders so well.
His comments on religion, faith and gods are always a treat to read, so insightful historically and joyously, pointedly funny.
I chose sitelinkJosé Saramago's sitelinkSeeing as an October read because Brazil held Presidential Elections on Octoberthst round and Octoberthnd round, since no candidate received more thanof the valid votes the first time.
Brazilian voting system is similar to that of the Görmek's unnamed place in that it is compulsory, We've had the closest race ever, with elected President winning by,against second place with
The Görmek's story begins precisely on Election Day, Only the race wasn't that close, even though it came out without a clear winner:of the votes were cast as blank.
It's as if Saramago just read sitelinkThe Trial and asked himself: "what if people rebelled against bureaucracy for once", thus revenging K's sad fate.
In Brazil, it is always emphasized that voting is not only an obligation, but also a right, I suspect the population in this story also believed that to be true, . .
"Casting a ballot is your irrevocable right, and no one will ever deny you that right, but just as you tell children not to play with matches, so we warn whole peoples of the dangers of playing with dynamite.
"
Once again, Saramago proposes that we ponder on a very difficult situation in this followup to his masterpiece sitelinkBlindness.
Not only the blank votes could be seen as a similar pest to the inexplicable blindness that happened in his early work both are represented by the color white , characters that experienced the blindness also appear in sitelinkSeeing.
The doctor's wife, the only known person who didn't go blind back then, could, somehow, be related to
this apparent insurgence The government, desperately in search of someone to blame, might think so.
Without any sort of analysis, the leaders's first reaction was to wonder whether this was a conspiracy taking place before their very own eyes.
Were they worried about the city in the first place, that would be ok, It turned out that was not the case,
"It is an unwavering rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start thinking, afterwards, it might be too late.
"
The dialogues between the leading men in charge the fact that there wasn't any female character in the government is a sad subject that deserves a whole book about it were realistic but also disgusting to read.
It's just one more example where we are able to witness how corruptive and addictive power can be to our race: it seems to be humanity's Achilles' heel.
The very power that was given by the people to the government is used against them no matter what in order to be sustained.
"But truths need to be repeated many times so that they don't, poor things, lapse into oblivion.
"
Another parallel to our Brazilian election was the role played by the press, A couple of days before the second round, the leading weekly publication in the country and one of the most influential outlets released an extra edition carrying severe complaints about one of the candidates the one who would end up winning.
It seems it was all manipulated and that the source for the article never uttered the bombastic words used in the headlines.
In sitelinkSeeing, the author described how the press serves the government in order to bias the public opinion and how the vehicles that try to go against it and remain impartial can suffer drastic consequences.
"We are born, and at that moment, it is as if we had 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"
This is my third Saramago novel, and it definitely won't be the last.
His witty remarks, fun observations and sarcasm applied to sensitive subjects but also to daily, ordinary ones that one wouldn't normally pay any attention to always make me smile and warm my heart.
Rating:white, .