Death with Interruptions

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature, recently (and infamously) remarked that American readers and writers are "too isolated, too insular" for an American author to win the Nobel in the foreseeable future. Proponents of American literature have rightly been outraged, sending Engdahl recommended reading lists of some of the best the United States literary community has to offer. One thing few Americans can quibble with, however, is Engdahl's observation that too little international literature is available in translation in the United States, a point that was borne out when Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the Nobel earlier this month. Almost none of Le Clézio's works are available in the U.S. In addition, only about three percent of books published in the U.S. each year are works in translation. Is it possible that American readers are isolated after all? Fortunately, one of the benefits when a non-English-speaking author does win the Nobel is that his or her subsequent works are likely to be among that three percent of publications that are available to U.S. audiences in translation. One of these authors is José Saramago, a Portuguese novelist and playwright who won the Nobel in 1998 and whose 1995 novel BLINDNESS has experienced great popularity in the United States, to the point of being turned into a feature film. Now, with DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS (originally published in the Portuguese in 2005), he offers Americans looking to read beyond their borders an opportunity to discover what the European literary scene is all about. Oh, and it's a great story to boot. Saramago's novel is set in an unnamed country where, on the first day of the new year, people cease to die. Those who were, so to speak, at death's door are permanently stuck in the doorway. Those who are declared "lost causes" by doctors following car crashes and other accidents somehow pull through. At first, people rejoice at the prospect of living, so it seems, forever. Soon, however, the philosophical implications and practical realities of the situation set in. "It's hard to understand," Saramago writes, "why no one saw at once that the disappearance of death, apparently the peak, the pinnacle, the supreme happiness, was not, after all, a good thing." Not only are there practical matters: What will happen to the funeral industry and the life insurance market? How will nursing homes cope with the constant influx of new residents when the oldest ones fail to...move on? How can families practically and emotionally continue to care for terminally ill family members indefinitely? There are also philosophical considerations: What are the implications for religion, which forms its entire belief system on the concept of death and rebirth? What are the national implications when a single country's inhabitants fail to die, even though their neighboring nations continue to live and die as they have for millennia? Saramag

Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago's latest novel, in the tradition of three of my favorite writers known for impressive first lines, Albert Camus, Toni Morrison and Herman Melville, begins with the intriguing sentence: "The following day, no one died." This allegory for modern times takes place in an unnamed country, with characters, most of whom have no names and where even death, like the other characters, does not even merit an upper case "D" to begin her name. Yes, she is female, composed only of a skull and bones, although she can transform herself into a reasonably attractive woman, and never of course sleeps. With death's moratorium on death, some results are immediate and obvious. The cardinal of the catholic church is one of the first to be upset. With no death, there is no resurrection. And with no resurrection, there is no church. Funeral homes are faced with an economic melt-down since they can now only offer burials or cremations to dogs, cats, canaries and other animals since animals were not affected by this stay on death. Nursing homes and hospitals are overrun with patients who cannot die and cannot live. Of course something has to happen to throw a monkey wrench into what appears to be eternal life as indeed it does although this is one of those novels where a review should not be a plot summary. (Actually no review should be just a plot summary.) Just let it be said that Saramago adroitly introduces into his narrative a mediocre cellist-- who has a fascinating encounter with death-- who admits that he is no rostropovich and whose favorite pastime is playing bach's suite number six for unaccompanied cello at night in his apartment. Surely nothing, as the brilliant film director Ingmar Bergman would agree, reminds us more of death than any one of bach's suites for unaccompanied cello. Additionally the author's messenger of death appears as a mailman-- who in this instance does not ring twice-- not a new device although an effective one. Joyce Carol Oates, who if there is any justice should win the Nobel Prize for Literature herself, sends death for Marilyn Monroe in her incomparable novel BLONDE as a messenger riding a bicycle. In this novel death wishes that she had used the death head moth, which has on the back of its thorax a pattern resembling a human skull, as her messenger, a chilling thought. Mr. Saramago's humor is both subtle and wry. Death chides her partner-in-crime the sythe for being lazy because he often spends all his days leaning against a wall. Since she consists of only bones, death ordinarily would not be able to lick envelopes-- although she has all kinds of powers and can move through walls-- but she takes advantage of self-sealing envelopes for her mail-outs. Literary critics have said that often winning the nobel prize dries up the creative juices of writers. While that case may be made for some authors, it does not hold true in this instance. DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS is a fantastic allegory that critic

"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

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 lar

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. The Nobel committee obviously got this one right.