Seeing - Softcover

"I have never read a novel that gets so many details of the political behavior that we for some reason insist on calling 'organized' so hilariously and grimly right."
--Jack Fuller"Chicago Tribune" (05/21/2006)

"Saramago has a taste for alternative realities, for the use of fiction as a form of speculation."

--Michael Wood"Slate" (04/10/2006)

"We live in 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."
-- (05/21/2006)

"[A]nother invaluable gift from a matchless writer"
--Kirkus Reviews (02/01/2006)

"Saramago's clear eye for acknowledging things as they are barrages us with valuable insights suggesting that the dynamics of human governance are not as rational as we like to think"
--Library Journal (04/01/2006)

"[A] searching, dry-witted, spot-on political parable ..."
-- (04/24/2006)

"Saramago's unsettling allegory of power and politics . . . stays with you long after the last page is turned."

-- (04/16/2006)

"A novel that says more about the days we are living in than any book I have read. [Saramago] writes with wit, heartbreaking dignity, and with the simplicity of a great artist in total control of his art."--Ursula K. Le Guin

"I have never read a novel that gets so many details of the political behavior that we for some reason insist on calling 'organized' so hilariously and grimly right." -- Chicago Tribune

The clarity and compassion of [Saramago's] vision make Seeing worthy of its name." --The Washington Post Book World

"Saramago understands that ridicule is a terrifically effective political weapon, and in Seeing he makes it his business to turn repression into farce...The 'blankers', as the stubborn nonvoters are called, are quiet and even docile, just the way a government ordinarily likes its citizens to be, but their refusal to pretend that the electoral process gives them a choice worth making is deeply subversive." --New York Times Book Review

"Saramago's unsettling allegory of power and politics . . . stays with you long after the last page is turned."-- Cleveland Plain Dealer

"We live in 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." -- Denver Post

"[A] searching, dry-witted, spot-on political parable." -- NewYork Observer

"The spirit of George Orwell rises from these blistering pages . . . another invaluable gift from a matchless writer." --Kirkus Reviews

On election day in the capital, it is raining so hard that no one has bothered to come out to vote. The politicians are growing jittery. Should they reschedule the elections for another day? Around three o’clock, the rain finally stops. Promptly at four, voters rush to the polling stations, as if they had been ordered to appear.

But when the ballots are counted, more than 70 percent are blank. The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that hit the city four years before, and of the one woman who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? A police superintendent is put on the case.

What begins as a satire on governments and the sometimes dubious efficacy of the democratic system turns into something far more sinister. A singular novel from the author of Blindness.