Death With Interruptions

[anarresa]

Death With Interruptions
By Jose Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
3 stars

Culture: Portugal

Looking up “Portugal” Saramago’s name came up again and again. This “novel” I thought would also be set in Portugal, but it is entirely fictional. I put novel in quotes because it is more like short stories woven together, but not actually separated. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day no one in the (unnamed) country dies. No one dies the next day, and the next. The first chapters of the book deal with the political and personal fallout of such a situation. There’s quite a bit of dark humor and satire in these tales. The end chapters of the book are more personal, though that person is death. She decided to put a hold on harvesting lives, and she decides when to re-start. Except for one man, who (unknowingly) defies her call.

I really liked aspects of the stories, but was bored by the whole. The concept of death as a character and even the pitfalls of immortality are not new concepts for me, as they might be to average literature readers. I was also very turned off by Saramago’s run-on (and on and on) sentences…and I am partial to long sentences. The only punctuation was the comma and it separated different lines of conversation between various people. That conversation, and the situations, were clever and amusing. I definitively think I will flip through a couple more of Saramago’s works, hoping to find the right fit.

[Cora]

I am reading Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda and it is exactly the same way with the never-ending sentences and commas.

[Jgrace]

I just finished his memoir Small Memories ....
more of the same.