Ensaio sobre a lucidez (Ensaio sobre a lucidez)

The only Portuguese-language Nobel Prize winner in history

A wonderful sequel to the classic "Blind"

After seeing it is a greater disaster. A thrilling exposition of all pretense of the rise of totalitarianism.

Guided by Zhang Shuying, Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages, National Taiwan University, and recommended by writer He Jingbin

Ursula Le Guin, Harold Brun, Eduardo Galeano unanimously

"A political fable that is thorough, grim, and precise." --The New York Times

"His novels say more about our lives than any book I have ever read." -- Ursula Le Guin

In a country where national blindness once occurred, the first national mayoral election was ushered in four years after the restoration of Ming Dynasty. Unexpectedly, it rained strangely that day, and people waited until the rain eased in the evening before going out to vote. 70% or more blank tickets. The government assessed that it was due to the weather, and decided to re-hold the poll every other week. Unexpectedly, more than 80% of the votes were blank in the second election. The government concluded that this anomalous phenomenon was clearly sabotaged by someone, declared a state of emergency in the capital, immediately closed the city, and secretly sent secret police to infiltrate the masses to monitor the people. Right now, the authorities, who are at a loss for blank tickets, received a confidential letter revealing that a woman could actually see during the national blindness epidemic four years ago, so the government turned its finger on this woman...

According to the law of the blind, the worst enemy is often the one closest to you.

Behind a mayoral election, human fears escalate again. Saramago uses his meditations and assumptions on the tragic life of human beings to add improbable events to real life with a calm and sharp writing style, and fabricates a chaos of blank tickets to expose the evil face of politics. Severely criticize bureaucratic and democratic systems that are closely related to people's lives. Saramago once said: "The so-called democracy is actually a system that is blocked and monitored. Through elections, we can replace the government, but we cannot change the power structure."

"Voting Notes" continues Saramago's creative characteristics. All the characters have no names, and the dialogue and description are completed in one go. Only commas and periods are used between the lines, and there are no other punctuation marks. The long and continuous sentences constitute his unique novel world. . Readers who are familiar with Saxony's writing style can quite enjoy the challenge of this kind of reading logic. It is difficult to describe this new tone, as the British literary critic James Wood said in the last sentence: "The unique tone of his novels comes from his narrative as if he is a person who is at the same time wise and ignorant."

We were blind, and we may still be blind.

The truth must be repeated, lest these poor things fall into oblivion.