Death with Interruptions
“The following day, no one died” (Saramago, 1). This matter-of-fact statement is the first sentence of Saramago’s novel Death with Interruptions. The New Year ushers in an unprecedented phenomenon for a single, unidentified country. Who needs Dick Clark or Ryan Seacrest celebrating your unattainable resolutions when you have something like eternal life to dissuade you from starting a diet?
While the prospect of immortality sounds initially alluring, the pragmatic implications quickly extinguish the citizens’ enthusiasm. What does this mean for religion? What does this mean politically, with an entirely new demographic? What does this mean for the economy? In what ways will long-established industries like health-care, funeral homes, and insurance companies reorient themselves now that their public services are practically obsolete? There are also philosophical repercussions—will lawlessness ensue now that death cannot be held up as a deterrent?
In the second half of the novel, Death taking on a human form. Death portrayed as a sentient being allows Saramago’s skills to really shine. She is fallible to some degree and she expresses feelings of restlessness, intrigue, exhaustion, etc. Saramago invites us to think differently about a typically chilling subject. He lends something very beautiful to the macabre.
Even more inventively, the writing style reads like a well-organized stream of consciousness. Death is interrupted but Saramago’s sentences certainly are not. One paragraph can run on for pages and a single sentence can often contain a lengthy dialogue. A conversation within an individual sentence is divided by capitalization; one person speaks for a bit and instead of an indention or period, the other person continues with a capital letter marking the beginning of their speech. It took a while to get used to, but it’s refreshingly creative. His narrative is out of the box, why can’t his syntax be aberrant as well?
Additionally, he develops a communal experience between the narrator and the reader, often using the word “we”. The narrator openly admits to wanting the reader to understand the plotline, so he apologizes when he feels he described something imperfectly and he always strives to go back and explain any narrative holes. It’s okay narrator, I forgive you—you’re trying your best.
In my opinion, Saramago is worthy of the Nobel Prize of Literature that he received. He was born to a peasant family in 1922 and had to drop out of his school at age 12. When he died, 20,000 people attended his funeral—a bold testament to his impactful writing as well as his influence in political and philosophical circles. Also, “Saramago” translates to “wild radish” in Portuguese, which sounds like something Gwenyth Paltrow would name her offspring. Radishes—like all vegetables—are gross.
Overall, this book was a delight to read. Not only did it provide a thought-provoking set of perspectives (the relationship of people to death and the relationship of death to people), it’s also pretty funny! Death has some comical conversations with her co-worker scythe and Saramago inputs plenty of irony and relevant puns that are slightly better than these:
Okay, actually those are great. Death with Interruptions receives 4 out of 5 flames. It is absolutely worth reading, but it did not stir me to a full five flames.
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