Seeing

With a sizable chunk of my booklog taken care of already this year, I recently started to explore some options on my Kindle. I went on a shopping spree, acquiring over twenty books and a lot of other potentially unbloggable stuff. A number of these books came from a steal I found- 12 novels by Jose Saramago for $20. I posted Blindness last summer and was a fan, and had interest in at least two other books of Saramago's, so I didn't hesitating in making this huge but cheap purchase, after which I immediately started into Seeing, the sequel to Blindness. For those who don't remember, the plot to Blindness is fairly simple- blindness suddenly and inexplicably starts spreading like a disease in a city in Portugal, leading to complete chaos within a few days. Seeing takes place four years later in that same city, people can see again, and it's election day. After all of the ballots are counted up, 70% of them are found to be completely blank. After a stern warning by the government and an impromptu second attempt at an election, even more ballots are left blank the second time. With this the president basically tells the city "shame on you" and the entire government up and leaves the capital city. This setup was similar to Blindness- take a normal, familiar place, introduce a strong gimmick, be it inexplicable blindness or equally inexplicable tremendous voter apathy, and let the story write itself. Nothing that happened in Blindness was too surprising, but it's at times brutal or beautiful and worked very well as a story. Unfortunately Seeing doesn't work nearly as well. You see (ha!), for the entirety of Seeing up to this point, there have been only vague references to the plague of blindness that affected the city four years ago, and I had no problem with that. Seeing seemed to be more of a thematic sequel to Blindness than a direct one. But halfway through the story takes a conspiracy turn- members of the government find out about the one person who could see during the blindness epidemic, and stop at nothing to make him a scapegoat for the current voting crisis. It was a pretty abrupt turn that definitely made me like the book less- what started out with great potential as a criticism of the very idea of 'politics' turned into a slightly more generic thriller. The second half still did have its merits though- checking in on some of the old characters was nice, and the troubled superintendent who becomes the protagonist in the second half may have been the most interesting of any character in either book; still though, I can't help but feel more could have been done to make the two parts connect. I mean, by the second half the question of why people suddenly voted for no one is dropped completely. While Seeing certainly had its share of flaws and wasn't nearly as good as Blindness, I still found it to be an enthralling read and have no problem with the fact that ten more Saramago books exist in my backlog.