While it may be more long-winded than most dialogue, it stills feel sharp and cutting when necessary. The dialogue is great, it flows like poetry (actually, all the prose flows like a poem, which is how Saramago can get away with his sentence structure, I believe). I think Seeing would translate well into a film or perhaps even a play.

Seeeing, however, is a very different book from Blindness – it is clearly a political satire and not nearly as dark. Seeing is technically a sequel to Blindness, the second half of the novel involves characters from Blindness and is sort of connected to events in Blindness ( Seeing is set in the same city, four years later, and is about the relationship between government and people, a relationship that played a large role in Blindness).

I must get on that! So, this book has been on my TBR list for awhile/ I was very delighted to find a good copy in the discount section at the only indie bookstore in my city a few weeks ago, as I’d seen copies at Chapters but they weren’t in very good condition (read: pristine, because I like my new books to be perfectly crisp). I haven’t read any Saramago since then, and I’ve just realized I’ve only read four of his books. Žižek’s understanding of a ‘revolution’ does not allow him to fully understand Saramago’s blank ballot vote – it being a valid non-vote, a positive negative.I read Blindness, the book that this one is a sequel (or perhaps the better term would be spiritual successor? It’s somewhere inbetween) to, over a year ago. But how do have to interpret this non-detrimental misreading? After having proposed a brief summary of Seeing’s plot and the various versions offered of it by Žižek, this article attempts to demonstrate and explain why Slavoj Žižek could not have not mis-read Saramago’s novel.

However, not once has Žižek offered his readers the correct message present in the plot of Seeing. José Saramago’s intriguing novel Seeing, that tells the story of the massive casting of blank ballots by the population and its political implications, has frequently been mentioned in some of Slavoj Žižek recent work. In this article, we investigate a mis-reading by the hand of Žižek himself. Mis-readings are not necessarily detrimental, Slavoj Žižek has interestingly argued.

Seeing saramago