"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.
