The insight

On a rainy day, in an imaginary city perhaps in Portugal, the voters refrain from going to the ballot boxes until four in the afternoon. Then they all arrive at the same time. And when the votes are counted, it turns out that about three-quarters of the voters placed blank papers in the boxes. After a week of panic that grips the government, the voting process is held again on a sunny day, and the result is shocking, as eighty-three percent of the voters cast blank papers. The "insight" of "Saramago" turns the policy of repression into bitter satire that exposes the democracy which aims to win through crooked methods, and the novel "The Sight" is almost the other face of his previous novel "Blindness," in which he imagines a deserted city in an unknown country struck by a strange epidemic—the loss of sight by everyone except one woman who remains the only witness to this catastrophe.