I will be shocked if I enjoy another book less this year. Seeing is a concentrated dose of all the things I disliked about its predecessor, Blindness, with almost none of the interesting, emotional, and otherwise compelling features.
I was intrigued that Saramago attempted a sequel to Blindness, and the premise of having an election “spoiled” by a new form of blindness in the form of blank ballots was definitely appealing. But this book spends so little time interested in really exploring either of these concepts as a good novel should. Of this book’s 307 pages, I feel comfortable estimating that at least half are devoted to Saramago’s rambling, satirizing, and philosophizing about politics and government corruption. And a good bit of it does not even come from character dialogue and perspectives.
As far as this being a sequel to Blindness, no character from the original novel makes an appearance until more than halfway through the book (page 170), and even then, the characters from Blindness do almost nothing. The government officials spend a decent amount of time talking about the doctor’s wife, but she really only shows up for a few conversations here and there. And if you were hoping for answers about how society restructured and rebuilt after the traumatizing and apocalyptic events of Blindness, you are out of luck here. In fact, readers are supposed to believe that the reason the events of Blindness are not even mentioned for the first half of this novel is because everyone in the entire society has an unspoken agreement to just not talk about what happened. Being four years removed from a pandemic at the time of writing this, I can safely say Saramago was totally wrong if he believed this is how any society would react in such circumstances.
As in Blindness, none of the characters have names and the dialogue is buried in massive, scarcely-punctuated paragraphs. This style is so much less tolerable here, given that this book barely has characters with any personality, charm, distinguishing features, or active role in the plot. Nameless government ministers, city council members, and police officers talking in office rooms could not be any less compelling.
There are good ideas in here, for sure. The Interior Minister is by far the most interesting entity in the novel, and he and the Prime Minister are adequate avatars of corruption and exploitation. But all the interesting ideas are just fragments of gold in a massive pile of sand. for whole chapters at a time, I struggled to stop my eyes from just glazing over pages of rambling text that did not advance the plot at all, and when I got to the end, I felt just as unsatisfied even if my boredom briefly morphed into annoyance. If you enjoyed Blindness, Seeing offers absolutely nothing to enhance the characters and will just leave you underwhelmed and upset. If you disliked Blindness, I cannot imagine how this book would appeal to you at all either. Clearly this book has its fans, but I am not one of them.
The Once and Future Lit 