Jose Saramago

Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate Jose Saramago is a contemporary Kafka, spinning existential fantasies built around his obsessions with the nature of vision, insight, perception, and imagination. In his books he grounds these philosophical preoccupations through everyman characters and settings so vibrant, distinct, and outlandish they confound attempts to connect them to any specific time and place. In Seeing, Saramago’s latest novel, an epidemic of blindness breaks out, affecting everyone except an eye doctor’s wife, who helps a group of newly blind people survive in a world gone dark and confusing. Toss in a general election with perplexing results (held during an unending rainstorm), and Saramago has created one of the most memorable–and inscrutable–revolutionary scenarios in literary history.