Review- Death at Intervals

Death at Intervals by José Saramago

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Like all Saramago's fiction, Death at Intervals begins with a fantastical and jarring premise: in an unnamed country, it suddenly becomes impossible to die. However, people can still age, meaning that increasing numbers of the population become incapacitated. For the first half of the book, the story is told at the societal level, focusing on the effects of the absence of death on different people. Undertakers are extremely upset at the affront to their dignity, as they are forced to spend much of their time burying animals. The (Catholic like) church is worried that its theology will lose adherents once the fear of death has gone. However, in an hilarious aside, insurance companies find a way to persuade their customers to continue paying their premiums.

In the first half of the book, there are few characters, the prime minister being one of the few people to have a speaking role, as he pursues a corrupt deal with the 'maphia' to smuggle debilitated citizens over the border, where they can die and ease the country's burgeoning economic crisis.

The style is typical of Saramago's mature writing, with long, extended digressions, curious idioms that are explained at length, and speech written in extended sentences, separated by commas rather than speech marks. The general effect of this style is to create a sense of confusion and dissimulation that well reflects the chaos caused by the turn of events.

During the second part of the novel, there is an abrupt shift of focus on to the character of death, personified as a woman. It is revealed the events were caused by her going on strike, and when she returns to 'work', she decides to send purple letters to her 'victims' rather than killing them without warning. However, one day, a letter is returned. Seeking an explanation, death discovers that the person who cannot die is a cellist who lives alone. Determined to discover his secret, she takes human form and goes to meet him. Thereafter, the novel becomes a love story of sorts, as the two characters, both very lonely in their very different ways, try to communicate with one another.

I won't give away the ending, other than to say that it casts doubt on the reasons why the course of events were set in train.

Death at Intervals is a brilliant, inventive novel. As with much of Saramago's writing, it illustrates, and satirizes, social structures and ideologies, particularly the excuses that governments gives for authoritarian actions, and also the doctrines of religious organizations. However, it also gives a an extremely artful characterization of loneliness, that has apparently continued without regard to the dramatic events that dominate in the first half of the book. The only downside of such writing is that it ends.



View all my reviews