Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago's brilliant new novel poses the question -- what happens when the grim reaper decides there will be no more death? On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration—flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Then reality hits home—families are left to care for the permanently dying, life-insurance policies become meaningless, and funeral parlors are reduced to arranging burials for pet dogs, cats, hamsters, and parrots. Death sits in her chilly apartment, where she lives alone with scythe and filing cabinets, and contemplates her experiment: What if no one ever died again? What if she, death with a small d, became human and were to fall in love?
"The following day, no one died." Thus begins Jose Saramago's latest masterpiece, a quirky, whimsical, and utterly enthralling tale called DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS. Written in Saramago's characteristic style - dense, run-on sentences filled with multiple digressive asides and dialog unseparated by line breaks or quotation marks - the book stands as an offbeat meditation on death and the manner in which humanity copes (or fails to cope) with it.
DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS consists of two loosely linked segments, the latter ultimately looping back to form a perfect circle with the former. In the first half of the book, death is an impersonal presence, noticeable only for its absence within the geographic borders of an unspecified country. Saramago here recalls the premise of the 1934 Frederic March movie, DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, only this time the holiday lasts far more than three days. As the number of-dying-but-not-dead bodies mounts, the country's various institutions are forced to deal with the implications of a cessation of death. Their reactions give Saramago free satirical reign over the situation as he takes humorous, low-key shots at everything from government, hospitals, and the funeral industry to insurance companies, religious institutions, and the maphia (his spelling).
Death returns in the book's second half, at first in the form of a rather scratchy, hand-written letter announcing its return at a specific date and time. The initial effect is cataclysmic as several months' worth of people accumulated at death's door instantly pass through en masse. Yet even as the natural order of things rights itself, death intervenes and decides (in an apparent fit of boredom) to change the way things are done. The change creates further complications for the living, but the new system nevertheless moves forward smoothly enough. However, an unexpected problem occurs that.forces death to take direct action, leading to the book's bittersweet conclusion.
The first half of Saramago's novel addresses death in the abstract. The numbers are large, the situations impersonal, the focus institutional - all representing in some way the concept of death and humanity's methods of dealing with it. Yet this half is by far the funniest as the author levels his satirical cannon at everyone in sight and comes up with paradoxical lines like one faceless government official's, "...if we don't start dying again, we have no future." In the second half, he switches gears to the level of the personal, developing a heart-rending story around two surprisingly sympathetic individuals. One is a fifty-year-old man, an unmarried cellist living with his pet dog. The other is death, represented as a female entity who ultimately takes on female human form. Saramago's genius is to extract so much from both segments while also tying them together in a touching manner that can only be described as literarily satisfying.
A curious stylistic feature of the book arises from Saramago's choice about referring to his character as death with a small "d" rather than "Death." He opines playfully about multiple entities called death, perhaps one for each country, a different one for plants and animals, and perhaps even a "big D" Death above them all who will someday bring the universe itself to an end. Since his main character is "small d" death, the author abandons capital letters throughout for his proper nouns, whether referring to bach, beethoven, baron munchausen, rome, the pope, proust, dracula, thanatos, or even a.t.m.'s. The only two exceptions - "tower of Babel" and "labyrinth of Knossos" - are certainly more than a little suggestive of Saramago's larger view of life and death.
Saramago's recent work - BLINDNESS, SEEING, and now DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS - have each dwelt upon the social and human implications arising from sudden disruptions in the natural order. BLINDNESS enabled him to explore the boundaries of civil human behavior - how fragile is what we call civilization and how close are we, really, to being animals. SEEING broached the political world and government's institutional paranoia toward the behavior of its own citizens. Now, in DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS, Saramago addresses the ultimate element in the natural order things, turning it on its side to show us in at our best and at our worst, with all our fears and hopes, our joys and sorrows, our failings and our soaring accomplishments. Once again, he proves himself the most deserving Nobelist for Literature in the last two decades. Simply brilliant - 10 Stars.
writes,
Saramago takes us on another haunting and chilling "what-if" journey (similar to Blindness & Seeing). This story is set in an unnamed country in modern Western Europe. On the first day of the New Year, no one dies -for unknown reasons. The populace rejoices over reaching the eternal goal.
"Humanity's greatest dream since the beginning of time, the happy enjoyment of eternal life here on earth, had become a gift within the grasp of everyone, like the sun that rises every day and the air that we breathe."
And then reality strikes - religious leaders lose their grounding ("if there was no death, there could be no resurrection, and if there was no resurrection, then there would be no point in having a church") - funeral homes and life insurance companies have lost their reason for existence ("then, without warning, the tap from which had flowed a constant, generous supply of the terminally dying was turned off") - hospitals and nursing homes start overflowing with the terminally ill - and the dark side of humanity (rearing its ugly head in "its enormous capacity for survival") begins to capitalize on the opportunity by transporting the terminally ill (for a fee) into bordering countries where Death continues to exist on its customary path.
The conclusion is eventually reached after several months that if "we don't start dying again, we have no future."
There are three distinct plot lines in this book. (1) "What-if" Death stops or is 'interrupted' (for 8 months). (2) "What-if" Death restarts (but under new conditions which I won't give away) and (3) "What-if" `death' (who comes 'alive' as a beautiful 36-year old woman executioner) fails to execute on a single victim (a middle aged cellist) on the required "due date."
My assessment:
* This is largely a deep, philosophical and engaging "what-if" rendering of what would happen if Death paused, restarted and "missed." Saramago's imagination, musings and reflections on human behavior are a wonder. There is little individual character development until the third plot line when he tip-toes into the mind of 'death' and the cellist - however, this does not detract from the Saramago's genius with words and his penetrating and profound storytelling.
* For those new to Saramago's unique and trademark writing style, it takes some getting used to. His prose is dense - he uses very little punctuation - he slides from one person speaking or thinking immediately to the next person within the same sentence broken up only with a comma. So your steady focus and attention is a requirement to follow the narrative - or you find that you will lose your way as to who is saying what. Yet, you will find yourself falling into a rhythm - not unlike the back and forth of normal conversation and thinking that we all experience - which places you squarely at the scene or at the center of the story.
* Unlike Blindness which has veins of hope, love, compassion, this story (perhaps not unlike Death itself) is largely a grim, morbid, hopeless, cynical story of humanity - until the conclusion where there is a flicker of light. That is my only rap against the book. Saramago seems to rail on the church and religion, government, politicians, businesses and human nature. There are no heros in this story. This story is laced with the dark side of life and human nature with very few acts of love, kindness, generosity - so it feels lobsided - dark with little hope. Yet, when he does inject the few incidents of "goodness" and hope into his story - it is welcomed like gulps of air after being under water for seconds too long. And, Saramago's story certainly makes you appreciate life (and Death) as we know and experience it today.
* Finally, my measure of a book is if you happen to remember it months or years after reading it. I suspect, like his novel Blindness, the answer will be YES for me for Death with Interruptions. Saramago's work is genius.
writes,
I haven't enjoyed a novel this much for quite some time. Saramago begins with a simple scenario (What if people stopped dying?), then takes it to riotous extremes. This results in a potpourri of profundity, absurdity and laugh-out-loud humor, all presented in a minimalist punctuation style that reads like nothing I've encountered previously. Very highly recommended.
