José Saramago always has a little political mischief up his sleeve. In “The Stone Raft,” (1994) the Nobel laureate imagined what would happen if his native Iberian Peninsula broke off from Europe and drifted out into the Atlantic Ocean. In “Blindness,” (1997) an unnamed city is suddenly rendered sightless, causing a breakdown in the normal order of things.
“Seeing,” Saramago’s latest grim parable, is a sequel of sorts to this book. As the action begins, the same unnamed town prepares for an election. After a torrential downpour stops, the entire village comes out to vote. Only when the ballots are tallied, a large percentage of them are blank. The population votes again, but this time a full 83 percent of them are abstentions.
The immediate parallels of this situation are apparent – and not just in America, where in 2004, exit polls predicted John Kerry would win by 5 million votes, only to have President Bush take the day by 3 million. Italy nearly entered a legal morass in its recent election, as did Belarus, Ukraine and Ethiopia, where voting irregularities are being investigated.
Ever the wily storyteller, Saramago quickly turns this electoral situation ominous. The president puts the city under siege and begins questioning citizens at random. Some are strapped to polygraphs. Others pulled off the street. No one will admit to having cast a blank ballot. At wits’ end, the government sends undercover agents into soccer stadiums. They return empty-handed. No one will talk.
All of this action unfolds in Saramago’s trademark style, which plunges readers into long, switch-backing sentences, one piece of dialogue at a time. Saramago apparently doesn’t believe in quotation marks, so the reader immediately must ratchet up his attention to stay tuned to the nuances in tone. Keeping track of the article in Saramago’s Jamesian-length sentences can be something of a chore.
But for all its difficulty, Saramago’s prose cleverly mimics the chaos and confusion of the situation. Interrogations unfold in rapid-fire conversation; kidnappings are done in the name of getting to the bottom of this revolution. Domestic spying is excused in the name of democracy. As our sense of alarm ramps us, so does the action – before long, the media have been relieved of their duties.
As “Seeing” tips from a political fable into a detective story of sorts, the book never takes its eye off the electoral game. We live in an age when democracy is being touted as the panacea to the world’s ills – and not just abroad. “Seeing” suggests a more complicated scenario. It offers that democracy is welcome in our times: that is, so long as it produces the results those in power want.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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Seeing
By José Saramago, translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Harcourt, 397 pages, $25
