Odd 'Death' best read without interruptions
Everyone dies. It's a fact of life. There comes a point when everyone passes from this mortal plain. But what if death just stopped?
Nobel Prize winner in literature Jose Saramago considers such a possibility in "Death With Interruptions," which was recently translated into English from Portuguese.
In Saramago's world, death stops visiting one specific country beginning on zero hour of the first day of January. From then on, for the next seven months, no one living inside that country dies. The very thing that at first seemed like a blessing turns into a nightmare as those who were hovering close to death remain in vegetative states, wasting away in a state of flux.
The absence of death also forces changes within the country's social and economic spheres. The old and infirm start to stack up, leaving officials in a quandary about how to care for the masses of not-quite-dead. In addition, the insurance and funeral industries are facing extinction and the religious community is up in arms over what could be seen as a complete contradiction to time-honored doctrine.
Saramago takes an almost antiseptic view of events. No one has a name, referred to as the prime minister, the son-in-law, the cellist. This treatment helps make death, that's death with a lowercase d, stand out among other characters. In essence it gives her more life than the living.
Written in an unconventional style, "Death" is a practice in patience. Paragraph breaks and periods are few and far between in Saramago's writing, and quotation marks are nonexistent, with capital letters and commas separating conversations in an almost unintelligible block of text.
Playing on the fodder of critics, Saramago pokes fun at his writing when describing the frustration of the media when printing a letter written by death, saying in part " ... one could even consider it a minor defect given the chaotic syntax, the absence of full stops, the complete lack of necessary parentheses, the obsessive elimination of paragraphs, the random use of commas and, most unforgivable sin of all, the intentional and almost diabolical abolition of the capital letter ... "
"Death" is not something one can come and go from. It takes some effort on the part of the reader and is best read over a short period of time, when undivided attention can be given.
Saramago's writing is an acquired taste that if allowed to percolate can produce rewarding insight. He challenges the reader to look beyond the words and focus on a thought-provoking concept that is well worth the time and effort.
E-mail: jharrison@desnews.com
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