Seeing

Seeing is a novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago, published in Portuguese in 2004 and in English in 2006. It was conceived as a sequel to Blindness (1995) and shares with it the unnamed city and the same narrative world, along with several of its central characters. Where the earlier book told of an epidemic of white blindness that plunged a society into chaos, this one returns to the same setting years later to explore a different crisis, one of a political nature.

The story opens on a rainy day of parliamentary elections in which most voters, acting independently and without any coordination, cast blank ballots. The government orders a repeat vote a week later, and the blank vote rises to eighty-three percent. Faced with this unexpected result, those in power launch investigations and adopt authoritarian, repressive and even illegal measures, seeking to explain the phenomenon by linking it to the white blindness of the earlier novel.

The second half centres on a police commissioner sent to the city to find those responsible for the supposed rebellion. Here several characters from the previous book reappear, including the doctor's wife, the husband, the first blind man and the dog of tears, now named Constant. The novel is a meditation on the mechanics of power and on how rulers respond to a peaceful revolution led by a disillusioned populace. Its publication provoked controversy in some quarters, a reaction the author had anticipated.