Product Description
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. (04/16/2006)

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 31 reviews)

A complete disappointment by OpportunityDeals

1 Stars
October 08, 2009
This is the first book I read by Jose Saramago. I read it in English. Absent a disastrous translation, it has been a total disappointment so far. I have read 236 pages (out of 306 pages the book has) and it has failed to capture my interest. I have kept reading just in case something interesting happens. But nothing so far. The book lacks the virtuosity and the imagination you would expect from a Nobel Prize winner. The book is about the plot 95% of the time. The psychology of the main characters is practically absent. There are no personal conflicts worth mentioning. This is a very shallow book. After I finish reading this book, I will give Saramago another try. But after reading "Seeing" I will less forgiving with a second book.

Don't think of it as a sequel, review by 17-year old by rw (california, usa)

3 Stars
June 27, 2009
I enjoyed Blindness, and expected Seeing to be made of the same material: lyrical, nerve-wrecking, bewildering. Like its precursor, Seeing juxtaposes witty dialogue with somber lines that evoke reflection, but in other respects the two books are dissimilar. Seeing is nearly as compelling as Blindness, but it's funnier, and with less real substance-- less happens. I'd suggest readers to think of Seeing not as a sequel to Blindness, though obviously the two books are related, but as a stand-alone book in the same universe. This way, they won't have any unfair expectations; this way, they can appreciate Seeing as a humorous companion to Blindness, and not get caught up in the second book's relative lack of depth and hasty resolution. After all, one can hardly criticize the author for keeping his style fresh.

amazing by Murray A. Crookes

5 Stars
May 22, 2009
Saramago is simply amazing. It won't be long until I own all of his books.

"The blank vote could be seen as a sign of clear-sightedness on the part of those who used it." by D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY)

5 Stars
February 17, 2009
"Blindness," Saramago's most successful novel in America, is a horror story disguised as sociopolitical allegory, while its follow-up, "Seeing," is a political thriller with a similar allegorical disguise. Both books are set in the same city and they share several characters, but to say that "Seeing" is a sequel is only half-true, since the tone and the themes are quite different. While the original novel is horrifically violent, the follow-up adopts a breezier manner; it's one of the funniest thrillers I've read--at least until Saramago's trademark cynicism returns full force in the final pages. In two back-to-back elections in an ostensibly democratic nation, the citizens turn in blank ballots in overwhelming majorities. That is, given choices that seem to be no choice at all, the electorate creates a choice all their own. "The blank vote could be seen as a sign of clear-sightedness on the part of those who used it," a sentiment that invites the disgust of the ruling patrons. "Rights are not abstractions, retorted the minister of defense, people either deserve rights or they don't." And, in the minds of the elected officials (and their media lapdogs), the citizenry not only doesn't deserve the right to vote, it doesn't even deserve the right to a government. So the bureaucrats, the police, the army all pack up and leave, surrounding the city and placing it under siege, waiting for the metropolis to implode. But, initially, nothing really happens (and I'll be deliberately vague about what does happen). There is a suspicious, transparently planned "terrorist" attack, but otherwise the city gets along just fine and its inhabitants quickly learn to govern themselves. Meanwhile, its self-exiled leaders try to sow divisions and mayhem in the city they left behind, but they only entangle themselves in a swamp of bureaucratic bungling, intra-party clashes, and petty personal squabbles. Indeed, it seems the government doesn't deserve its people. Faced with the devious subtlety of peaceful resistance, the administration resorts to a plan that avoids painful introspection: pinning the debacle on a scapegoat. Gradually, the Keystone Cops imbroglio of the book's first half gives way to a menacing, conspiratorial mission led by an undercover police "superintendent" who is sent back into the city but who gradually questions the virtuousness of his task. Into an urban nightmare that could have been imagined by Kafka slips this conflicted agent straight out of a Graham Greene novel. In the end, I found this novel to be every bit as dark as "Blindness"--and every bit as readable. Beneath the author's famously intimidating page-long sentences, unpunctuated dialogue, and unnamed characters are two energetic novels of suspense; the intricacy of the prose slows readers down just enough to appreciate the satire and the wordplay. Still, I couldn't help myself: I rushed through the last 50 pages of its shocking, unexpected finale as if I were reading a Bourne novel.

I could not finish the book by Sung Kim (Los Angeles, CA United States)

1 Stars
April 26, 2008
I guess I was looking for a sequel to Blindness and this book is defintely not a sequel to Blindness. Book could have been good, but after reading first 40 - 50 pages, I could not bring myself to devoting more time to finish this book.

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