Jose, can you see?: Blindness, Siege of Libson, and Jose Saramago

In the other novel for which Jose Saramago is best known among English-readers, Blindness, he takes one odd concept - a city in which an epidemic of blindness is making the entire population blind - and slowly, gradually, builds on this premise; for me, the novel was very slow-moving, like a machine grinding on slowly, the gears turning, the mechanism rising incrementally up the mountain path. In other words, I appreciated the intelligence and imagination but ultimately lost interest and never finished reading the novel. His other famous novel, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, also takes an offbeat premise and plays it out to its (not necessarily inevitable) conclusion: what happens if a proof-reader willfully inserts inaccurate information into a work of historical research? This novel, though by no means a fast-paced thriller, to put it mildly, is for me much more complex and rewarding than Blindness: here we have a great recounting of the important (if little known till this novel was published in about 1990, at least among American readers) historic event - he describes the assembling of the forces outside the walls of Lisbon with almost Homeric skill - but also the sad story of the proof-reader, his lonely life, his yearning for the romantic attention of his chilly supervisor; and also but intelligent reflection and perspective on the act of writing and the boundaries between truth and fiction. The essence of the novel is the proof-reader's decision to actually write his own history of the siege, following out the inaccurate information that he maliciously inserted into the original history, but to take the events as material for fiction - which of course is what Saramago himself is doing - which makes us reflect on what it actually is that novelists do, and, more broadly, how we gain access to any information about a time other than that in which we live, or to a consciousness other than our own. Fiction is one way to do so (also dramatic arts, and other art forms, in a somewhat more abstract and indirect way: we "know" the mind of Mozart through his music, for example - but it's different from the way in which we "know" Anna Karenina) - and it's not just fiction that is fictive: history itself, as we come to know it, is a result of many choices made by writers, and editors, all of which shape the way we see and know the past, much in the same way that the text of a novel shapes our sense of consciousness. Put another way: is Abraham Lincoln, as we know him, in any way different from Huckleberry Finn? To quote Thomas Wolfe: Which of us has known his brother? Perhaps on some level everyone but ourselves - or even ourselves - is a "character."