The Assignment

Reading the foreword to The Assignment, I reached a passage that made me cringe:

The work is described as "a novella in twenty-four sentences." What accounts for this stylistic idiosyncrasy? In her autobiographical account Charlotte Kerr tells us that, while they were both still thinking about projects based on Bachmann's novel, the couple sat one evening over a bottle of wine, listening to Glenn Gould's performance of the first half of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier I. When the last of the twenty-four movements had ended, Durrenmatt rose, turned off the record player, replaced the LP in its case, and said, "So, now I'm going to write the story in twenty-four sentences." (The German word for a musical movement is Satz, which also means "sentence".)

The writer of the foreword goes on to expand on the relation of Durrenmatt to Bach, on music to prose, et cetera. It's not that I object to drawing inspiration from other art forms, or  the relation of a style of writing to a style of music, it's that a self-imposed limitation such as the above would seem to lead to a rambling form of stream-of-consciousness that would be tedious to process and absorb. Fortunately, this is not the case; I found The Assignment to be easier reading that the works of Jose Saramago, who often employs a similar style of pages and pages of one sentence. So while each of the twenty-four chapters here is one sentence only, many are extremely short, (the first three are only two pages each), and even the longer ones remain digestible.

This is an odd novel -- the subtitle is "On the observing of the observer by the observed." This is perhaps best illustrated by the anecdote told by our protagonist's friend, the logician D.: that his house is on a mountain, and he often catches tourists observing it with binoculars, while he in turn watches through his telescope. When they seem him observing them, they become upset and withdraw. Some return later and throw rocks. Everyone in the novel is both observing and observed, and the way this is portrayed in the climax gives that moment a bit of a comic tone. It's an unsettling and easy read.

Seeing

Seeing is a novel that opens in a rainstorm, but features a light, jocular tone, despite the fact that the events described darken significantly as the pages advance. It's a political parable without being overbearing, and possessing an ambiguous ending. While ostensibly a sequel to Saramago's earlier novel Blindness, no knowledge of the former is necessary to appreciate or enjoy Seeing, as the important points are explained when necessary.

One of Saramago's signatures as a writer is his refusal to delineate dialogue with paragraphs, indentation, the usage of quotation marks, or any other form of conventional punctuation. Instead, his dialogue is an endless series of commas. This is absolutely frustrating to read, but when one has a Nobel Prize, one can write how one wants. While I'd been familiar with Saramago's style, (I had previously read Death with Interruptions), it was still a frustrating experience, as it's easy to lose one's place, or switch the speakers up.

While the dialogue can be a chore to keep track of, it's a pleasure to read -- fast-paced, snappy, ironic, and full of characters questioning each other for their usage of vocabulary and various turns of phrase. The omniscient narrator also follows the same pattern -- apologizing for digressions, speaking in hypotheticals about the characters, and treating the plot as if he were observing it, rather than dictating it.

The plot of the novel revolves around the question of what would happen if a majority of the electorate were to cast blank ballots in a national election. This is exactly what does happen in the capital city of the never-named country -- first seventy-some-odd percent of the votes are blank, and then in the special runoff election, it's eighty-three percent. This is met by consternation and then terror by the government officials, who remove the government from the city and seal off the exits.

The government expects its withdrawal to foment anarchy, but are unpleasantly surprised when this fails to happen. Steps are taken to change this, but even a false flag terrorist attack fails to rouse the populace -- there are non-violent demonstrations, but societal calm prevails. Even when the members of the populace who hadn't cast blank ballots attempt to leave the city (and are turned back at the border), the rest of the population helps them return to their homes. As the government takes more and more extreme measures throughout the novel, several former underlings resign. This takes place both at the cabinet level (and results in the prime minister wearing several hats), but also at a more local level, as other functionaries quit.

It's ambiguous what point Saramago is making here -- it's not that democracy is a sham and society would be better off under a sort of collectivism, but more likely that in a democratic society which only has the illusion of choice (such as here, where the opposition to the party on the right is the party in the middle), people will want to throw the whole system out and start over. Of course, government will never allow such a thing, especially the one here, led by the power-hungry prime minister.

Seeing meanders for a bit before reaching its conclusion -- this is a function of not focusing on one character, but letting the narrative bring one or the other to the forefront as needed, then discarding them when their function is fulfilled. Sometimes this is quite literal, as in the case of the police superintendent. Despite all the meandering, the conclusion to the novel, while unexpected, can only be perceived as inevitable.