José Saramago
Saggio sulla lucidità

THE REVIEW

The visual impact is important, capable of exposing your real desire to read in an instant: it only takes a casual flick through the book and, BAM, a dense and fine rain of words filled with asides for almost bottomless sentences. Pages where pauses in the form of airy paragraphs are missing; in the lexicon, then, no relief or stylistic flourishes. Saramago. No foothold for this political j'accuse that will proceed straight and smooth, raw and pure, interrupted only by a few scattered chapters, not even numbered.

Like a climber who applies magnesium to his fingers before starting the ascent and takes hold, I begin to read and enter a rainy day. But of brick, if that's the misleading idea I've given you, it is not at all. As evidence, the fact that "Ensaio sobre a Lucidez" is already, by nightfall, together with the others from this 2011 chattering noisily on the shelf.

The location is the ill-defined setting of "Blindness," but the structure of the work is completely different. If in the milky disgrace of the previous novel one of the main pillars was the fierce depiction of a society in sudden free fall and with no way out, in "Seeing," the descriptions are placed in the background: faded and vague, the author's brushstrokes are lost in the smoky horizon. The characters seem almost insubstantial, and we struggle to give them a face, a physiognomy. And it's not because they lack names, but it seems the author doesn't care about the useless and wants to give us only the essence. Very bitter because the political message of this book is poisonous; a denunciation, a provocation, very sharp and pungent with almost explosive connotations.

The vast majority of the population of a western capital on a rainy election day arms itself with the electoral certificate to cast blank sheets. One after the other, they progressively form a boundless stack. A constitutional right, to be clear, and it's not a minor emphasis; perhaps I'm wrong to enclose it in an anonymous aside, but Saramago is infecting me. The fact is that this single non-action, harmless and legitimate in itself, multiplied by 80% of eligible citizens, in the eyes of the government, turns into an attack. A devious and unprecedented conspiracy for a time bomb, full of rusty nails and scrap metal, placed in the heart of the parliament and ready to explode. Any action in such a context is legitimate to defuse it.

But this initial cue, which I find less brilliant and astonishing compared to the opening of "Blindness," is nothing but an excuse to talk with explosive force about the limits of a democracy pitilessly exposed. Rhetorical, false, and mean, capable of interpreting any anomalous element as a danger; not so much because it's potentially lethal to the stability of the population and the country, but for the attachment to the seat at any cost by the unworthy political class.

Saramago will pin you down by describing, with glacial detachment, a spectacular crescendo. A pathetic and ignoble game of chess played by the government which, devoid of any restraint and clarity, will move both the white and black pieces up until the dry grand finale. I prefer other books by this author, but it remains a read of the highest level: sharp, stimulating, and above all, current in the powerful message it sends.

I am not too happy to note that one can also hypothesize, with a low margin of error, that these largely ignored pages will also be quite long-lived.