![]() ![]() ![]() Yet it works: as the novel establishes its figures (the pompous president, tremulous ministers and pantomime detectives), it acquires the momentum of a bedroom (here, cabinet) farce, baldly sending up EU politicos and major media editorialists. Seeing COVID-19 through José Saramagos Blindness Some 6 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the emotional devastation, socioeconomic impacts, and pressures on front-line health-care workers continue to shape our world. The allegorical blindness/sight framework is weak and obvious, and Saramago's capital city sometimes reminds one of Dr. ![]() The president receives an anonymous letter revealing the case of the eye doctor's wife (she and the group she helped had kept her support secret), and the minister in charge of internal security sends undercover policemen to investigate her connection to the "blank" revolution. The president declares a state of siege, but even though soldiers cordon off the city, nothing affects the city's maddening cheerfulness. His new novel, set in the same capital city four years later, depicts a legal "revolution," when 83% of its citizens cast blank ballots in a national election. , an unnamed capital city experiences a devastating (although transient) epidemic of blindness that mysteriously spares one woman, an eye doctor's wife, who helps a blinded group survive until their sight returns. ![]() In Nobel Prize–winner Saramogo's best known novel, Blindness ![]()
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