This is the kind of book that changes the way you think. Scott’s concept of legibility and power is so clear and obviously applicable to our time, and the historical references reinforce how our present ideas are just a gross continuation of old power policies.

Lacked the fun of his first book, the Martian, and became a plodding, formulaic book. I didn’t care whether either character lived or died (nor, for that matter, whether the earth in the novel was destroyed!

The first half was amazing. The second half was convoluted and morally concerning without being that thought-provoking. In the end it failed its premises

There just wasn’t much to it. The main supporting character was an insubstantial whiner with very little capability for introspection or growth, and the main character was superhuman which is always a bit boring

This is my second Saramago novel, and I am catching on to his trick.

Changing a single word in a history book drives the story in "The History of the Siege of Lisbon." and a sudden onset of viral blindness in a Spanish city triggers the cascading narrative of "Blindness." The game for Saramago, it seems, is to exploit the possibilities inherent in the perturbation of an initial condition. Like a culinary artist on "Top Chef" challenged to prepare a feast based on a "secret ingredient," Saramago seems to find potential in the constraint of a discrete, odd proposition.

I can imagine him sitting at his desk, "What would happen if a man suddenly went blind as his car was parked at a red light...?" "Who would drive his car home?" "What if the 'good Samaritan' were actually a car thief?" And so on. It becomes a queered game of "choose your own adventure" where the story spurls out from a single incident like a slime mold, concentrating where there is deep narrative potential, "What if the first victims were interned?" and extending outwards in space and time to find new possibilities when the dramatic energy of the idea has been consumed.

This approach is not without risk. If a topic is insufficiently deep or broad, the voyage can founder because the questions raised are uninteresting, or their resolution banal. But blindness is the richest and deepest of veins. Blindness is Oedipus and Lear. It is the fodder of countless aphorisms. It is a core metaphor for faith and awareness and empathy. Blindness matters because seeing matters.

Saramago's obligation is not to stretch the metaphor to fill a novel, but to pare it down. If this is an exploration of the symbolic and social potential of blindness, then his role is to cut away everything that is not essential, that does not provide structure or dimension. Blindness is about what is left when you think there is nothing, and "Blindness" needs to respect that austerity or become bloated and trivial.

And it delivers. It is not a perfect book, the characters can come across more like those of a morality play, defined by distinction from another or from the setting, but not developing over time. They are more chess pieces than humans, being moved around the board without really developing an expanded range of behavior. Saramago doesn't even give them names, instead applying roles like "The Doctor" and "The Doctor's Wife" that allow us to track them without granting them depth.

Where the novel shines is in the set pieces where Saramago can explore aspects of human behavior like self-interest, common good, marriage, duty, and our proclivities to violence and power-seeking. Saramago is not sentimental, even if he is not subtle. A group of blind inmates obtains a gun, and the imbalance of power leads them to appropriate all of the food and eventually make shocking demands of those without the ability to defend themselves.

Saramago's conceit gives scope to exploring a wide range of social questions and scenarios, but it isn't a plot device. It is a constraint like telling an artist "Draw a sunset without the color orange." It leads to fantastic creativity yet is pointless. "Blindness" doesn't take us anywhere in particular. It is like a theme park, where you can travel from Adventureland to the Future without making progress. You are simply having experiences, and perhaps that is enough.

An interesting contrast to Saramago's approach is Shakespeare. King Lear upon the heath is the unaccommodated man, physically and metaphorically blind, who acquires the gift of insight through the consequences of his vanity and self-destructive behavior. Perhaps "Blindness" is just a reimagining of the same scene. But without the wind and the wailing, absent the keening sense of loss that Lear experiences, the setup just feels clinical and dispassionate.

"Blindness" makes us see, but I am not certain it makes us feel.

Can one be alienated and at home at the same time? Can we love something so very deeply even when we are not sure it exists? Can we contain not only multitudes but opposites and contradictions, optimism and grief?

Brautigan’s “Trout Fishing in America” is a ramble about our relationship with our culture and the earth itself. Brautigan, who composes Trout Fishing from a series of tidy yet absurd vignettes, gives us a sometimes silly, sometimes incisive, sometimes melancholy discourse on nature and society in America. His America, our America, is a place of majesty and mass marketing, of serene streams filled with steelhead and rainbow trout, and of marketers selling those same rivers, bugs, and waterfalls out of a backlot by the foot.

Trout Fishing in America is about trout fishing, well not really, more about being connected with nature and nature providing. It is about coming to a river and catching your limit. And it is also about “Trout Fishing in America,” a symbol of the elaborate stage-set simulacrum of America where cowboys stride mightily and statues remind us what we are supposed to stand for. We are men of the mountains, rugged and individual, even as we seek to pave, turf, and monetize that very splendor.

The themes in Trout Fishing are very contemporary - alienation, exploitation, and the almost bipolar obsession that America has with revering and annihilating the natural world. We are men (and women) who (re)move mountains.

I live in Mill Valley, a town mentioned in the book, and you can still catch the scent of Brautigan’s world here if you close your eyes and listen deeply. The beauty is still there, especially as you drive over the mountain, a beauty that transfixes folks from the Pacific Northwest, as the author was. It is a beauty barely saved by the people of the '60s and '70s who understood that the earth was a source of power and wisdom, not solely a resource to be marketed and depleted.

Fishing in America has a minor focus on statues, particularly Ben Franklin’s in a park in San Francisco. I have long had a fascination with statues because they are so arbitrary. They are rarely art and seem to be manifestations, bookmarks in bronze and stone to remember what we are supposed to think. Statues aren’t. They represent things, but only least which the actual person (or personification) they are modeled on. They are out of date instantly, and in the best case become ironic.

So too with “Trout Fishing in America,” the character and the book. Both represent something lost, something that may have been true (or may not). It is odd and purposefully inscrutable but not dishonest.

Those who want a straightforward narrative, clear exposition, and conventional place and time will be deeply frustrated because Brautigan does not care. He cares about the America of wild rivers and streams, and whether you respond to it or not is more about the you that comes to this story than the story itself, or the storyteller.