It would have been difficult to time this week’s read any more perfectly. As the political debate season (and by season, I mean solid year of campaigning) heats up, I just so happened to dive into a book whose central conceit is a capital city in which 80% of the voters have cast blank ballots, throwing the electoral process into chaos and resulting in the government’s wholesale abdication of the city and investigation into what the politicians consider a large-scale conspiracy. Throw in a Michele Bachmann or two and it might as well be present-day.
I first discovered José Saramago a few years ago, when I read Blindness for a book club. Saramago fans will remember Blindness as the story of a city whose entire population goes blind, save one woman who uses her inexplicably retained sight to protect her husband and a group of strangers while they’re stuck in the insane asylum where they’ve been forcibly quarantined (they were sent there when the government still thought the epidemic could be controlled through isolation). Mark Ruffalo fans will remember Blindness as a 2008 movie with an all-star cast and a really disturbing rape scene. Me, I remember it both ways–as a dedicated reader of socio-political Armageddon-type novels, and as the girl who once followed Mark Ruffalo around a Tower Records for 20 minutes (discreetly…ish.) Continue reading “These Days, I’d Prefer to Be Deaf”
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