Death With Interruptions by José Saramago / Review

In an anonymous country on New Year’s Day, no one dies. No one dies the next day either. Or the next. Seemingly, death has been (accidentally) vanquished, and celebrations and patriotism abound throughout the countryside. That is until the people realize what a life without death really means.

You see,  those who are aging, ill, or lingering on the line between life and death are not miraculously cured. They just won’t die.  Families are left to watch their loved ones suffer and left to care for them indefinitely. Major industries, too, are left in turmoil. What will become of the funerary industry or life insurance in a world in which death has no place?  What will become of religion, whose dominant source of power is that of life after death?

Soon, the country and government falls into turmoil. Maphiosos (spelled with a “ph” to distinguish them from the other mafia) control large human smuggling rings that transport the dying to neighboring countries so that they can finally pass over into death. The neighboring nations, in turn, threaten war. What seemed utopian quickly turns catastrophic for the nation who thought they could overcome death.

Death With Interruptions is a fascinating, challenging, read. Admittedly, this is my first encounter with reading Saramago, but I was surprised by the heaviness of the text — very few paragraphs and lost of words on a page. There is little capitalization (a point the narrator makes himself) and virtually no characters.  Death, a woman, and the cellist with whom she becomes infatuated in the second half of the book are the only characters Saramago’s narrative follows — and even that is merely two-dimensional.

Rather, the narrator himself/herself/theirselves becomes the primary protagonist, with an incredibly strong, tongue-in-cheek tone that had me laughing out loud more than once. Self-referential and sly, the narrator is at once thoroughly modern and also ancient — like a Greek chorus commenting on the folly of the human players below.

While Saramago’s prose is beautiful, taking surprising turns throughout the novel, I found myself marvelling at the skill of a good translator — a translator like Maragaret Jull Costa here.  With Saramago’s unusual vocabulary and interesting syntax, I was so impressed by someone with such a command of not only English but also Saramago’s native Portugese.

This is a book that I would love to teach — it’s fresh and strange. It’s difficult.  It’s philosophical yet sarcastic. I had not finished the first chapter before knowing that this is the kind of book that bears hundreds  of re-reads.  Next time,  I am pulling out the “reading kit” my students made for me last year, full of colored pens and highlighters and post-it notes.  Death With Interruptions is the kind of book that makes me excited to be a reader, always uncovering new personal treasures to spend hours pouring over.