What if most of the voters in an election decide to cast blank ballots? This is the premise of José Saramago novel, Seeing, which offers a singularly dark view of democracy. The Portuguese Nobel laureate returns to the capital of an unnamed country whose citizens inexplicably lost their sight in his 1995 novel, Blindness, to explore the consequences of a new challenge to discerning the truth—what the defense minister calls “a depth charge launched against the system.” And the hapless government's reactions—to declare a state of emergency, to lay siege to the city, anything to bring the electorate to heel—threaten to destroy the system it has sworn to uphold. Saramago's satire, played out in his signature long sentences, in which different characters speak without quotation marks and which can leave a hasty reader bewildered, reminds us of democracy's inherent fragility.