“The
following day, no one died” (Saramago, 1). This matter-of-fact statement is the
first sentence of Saramago’s exquisitely translated Portuguese 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? It calls into question centuries of
resurrection-related dogma and challenges the existence of God as well as His
range of omnipotence. What does this mean politically? How do government officials
assuage the masses and how do they respond to an uncontrollable 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? The sudden disappearance of death welcomes a
contentious debate about the nature of death herself (death has historically
been personified as a female and Saramago continues with this gendered
pronoun). Death has forgone her duties in this country alone and while humans
still stand, plants and animals continue to perish; thus, many people logically
deduce that there is hierarchy of deaths separated by taxonomic rank, nation,
etc. This visceral reaction of the humans in the story to try and understand
and define concepts that lay beyond their grasp and are perhaps unknowable is
one of the more interesting threads of the novel. The book is rife with
references to what is seemingly “natural”/“normal”, and it upholds a steady
unease that humanity bears whenever the order and structure of society is
twisted. We eventually adjust, but we have a hard time rollin with the punches.
In their
efforts to adapt, the country’s inhabitants get creative. Some defy death by
transporting their suffering, catatonic friends and family across the border,
where they instantly decease. Noticing an opportunity to exploit, a
body-smuggling organization called the “maphia” (a very basic mafia, indeed) surfaces. Their actions open up a can of
morality worms and a controversial dispute erupts over whether the process is
murder, suicide, or something else altogether. But, as the narrator reminds us,
this is what happens “when pragmatism takes up the baton and conducts the
orchestra, ignoring what is written in the score” (Saramago, 59).
The musical
motif remains consistent throughout the novel, as the second half depicts death
taking on a human form and, much to her surprise, falling in love with a
cellist. Once her deprivation-of-death experiment takes its toll, she dabbles
in other tweaks of the age-old system, one of which leads her to an unexpected
obstacle. The cellist, through seemingly no volition of his own, refuses to
die. Death is flabbergasted! She does not know what to do because she has been
in the business for so long that she can’t even remember who put her in charge;
therefore, she has no one to consult. Instead, she takes matters into her own
hands, bringing personification to a whole new level in order to personally
analyze her preposterous death-defyer. 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
penetrates our reflections on a morbid subject without being piercing; the
subject is confronted creatively enough to not feel too depressing and as such,
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 and it is the chief source of
complaint among those who do not like the novel; however, I think it is a
refreshing take on the traditional grammatical system. 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 did a good job.
Between the
ingenious tale, his unique linguistic structure, and his congenial narrator,
Saramago proves he is worthy of the Nobel Prize of Literature that he received.
He can sing “Started from the Bottom” and mean it much more than Drake can
(please check out that ridiculous music video which makes me doubt my affinity
for Drizzy). Saramago was born to a peasant family in 1922 and was forced to
drop out of his school at age twelve. 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. Perhaps he writes the way he does because
the basic rules of grammar were covered in seventh grade? Most importantly,
“Saramago” translates to “wild radish” in Portuguese, which sounds like
something Gwenyth Paltrow would name her offspring. Also, 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:
Furthermore, I enjoyed his expert employment of the
symphonic metaphor. I spotted several parallels between the music that the
cellist plays and life’s own orchestra. For instance, death enjoyed her cellist’s
tune “because of its tragic brevity, its desperate intensity, and also because
of that final cord, like an ellipses left hanging in the air, something yet to
be said” (Saramago, 194). And if you find yourself getting bogged up in the
impossibility of the story, just remember, “all the many things that have been
said about god and about death are nothing but stories, and this is just
another one”, so add it to the shelf (Saramago, 162). In sum, I give the book 4
out of 5 camel humps. It is a novel absolutely
worth reading and a book worth thinking about, but it did not stir me to a full
five humps.
*Saramago, José. Death with Interruptions. New York:
Mariner Books, 2009. Print.
