Written by: Slawka Grabowska
London: Vintage, 2017
307 pages
ISBN 9781784871772
In this novel, José Saramago, the 1998 Nobel laureate, writes again about the same unnamed country he used in his other well-known work, Blindness. Writing for The Guardian, Ursula K. Le Guin gave Saramago’s Seeing high praise, noting that, “He has written a novel that says more about the days we are living in than any book I have read. He writes with wit, with heartbreaking dignity, and with the simplicity of a great artist in full control of his art. Let us listen to a true elder of our people, a man of tears, a man of wisdom.”
As the novelist Helder Macedo, emeritus professor of Portuguese at King’s College London said: Saramago has always been a “writer of allegories with a universal outlook. His starting-point is not ‘once upon a time’, but ‘what if?’.” And we find the same thing in this book: some kind of political defiance takes place when 70% of voters leaves their ballots blank. The Election is repeated but this time the problem is even worse: now it’s 83% blank votes. The government tries to deal with it and force the population to regret their choice (or better said the lack of it).
At Donostia Book Club, we decided to talk about Seeing on April 17th. In an interview with The Guardian Saramago said: “my work is about the possibility of the impossible. I ask the reader to accept a pact; even if the idea is absurd, the important thing is to imagine its development. The idea is the point of departure, but the development is always rational and logical.” And we try to have this thought present at our meeting.
Below you have some questions to ponder about the book:
- How is democracy presented in the book?
Does the author criticise it?
- What do you think about the decisions taken by
the government in Seeing?
- Does the result of election force the authorities
to reflect on their own validity? If so, how?
- Can you see any similarities with George Orwell's works?
- What are the connections between Seeing and Blindness?
Have you read both novels?
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