It turns out that there is a sequel to Saramago’s “Blindness” – and it’s called, guess what, “Seeing:”
Seeing is a story set in the same country featured in Blindness and begins with a parliamentary election in which the majority of the populace casts blank ballots. The story revolves around the struggles of the government and its various members as they try to simultaneously understand and destroy the amorphous non-movement of blank-voters. Characters from Blindness appear in the second half of the novel, including ‘the doctor’ and ‘the doctor’s wife’.
On a different note, I was struck by the fact that since we are covering contagions, we should be ideally covering post-contagion rehabilitation processes as well – once textually blinded, one needs to open his/her eyes sometime after all 🙂
I haven’t read the sequel but it got poor reviews if I remember right. Let me know, if you get it, what you think.