Death at Intervals

Death At Intervals by Jose Saramago (2008).

In a particular country, on the first day of the new year, people stop dying. In this book we see how that country reacts to this strange paranormal event. We see how ever-lasting life is not all it's cracked up to be, and how much we rely on the deaths of others so that we may live. Then, as suddently as she disppeared, death returns. This time giving the soon to be departed a warning of their impending fate in the form of a letter. But what if one of those letters gets returned to the sender?

Very mild spoilers ahead

Saramago's "Death At Intervals" is a stand out book this year. The concept of ever-lasting life is not unique, but Saramago explores it from a unique perspective. We don't focus on the ones that were meant to die but survive. We focus on the true living. We see how their lives are affected by this unexpected change to the status quo. How funeral homes and hospitals and care homes and life insurance companies are affected. For the first half of the novel, we see how this nation deals with such a major shift.

In the second half of the novel, death returns. This time giving a one week warning before she ends your life. A courtesy to allow enough time to get your affairs in order. But when a letter refuses to be sent to its target, death must investigate why.

It is not only the plot that I enjoyed. But also the way it was told. The most obvious part being Saramago's utter disregard for the standard rules of grammer that other writers follow. He forgoes speech marks and re-assigns new roles to the comma and full-stop. Even upper case letters fall victim to Saramago's re-invention of language. If you flip through this book, you will find page after page of edge to edge prose. Saramago doesn't bother with line breaks for dialogue, so you'll find no blank spaces here. It is intimidating to look at. Such dense writing is usually seen in text books rather than fiction. Even paragraphs intimidate. At one point there was a single paragraph that spanned three pages. At the end of book there are several blank pages, as if Saramago simply moved all whitespace to the back of the novel.

Despite the stylistic choices, at no point during the novel was I confused. Saramago wrote in such a way that speech marks are not needed. Line breaks are pointless. Capital letters are proven to be convention and done away with without losing a single drop of meaning. This dense style makes the novel feel faster than it otherwise would. As if we are speeding through the events without feeling like we are along side the characters we are reading about.

Major spoilers ahead.

The events of the story are told as if we were a ghost, peering in to the lives of others. Instead of feeling like we are in the room with the characters, we feel like we are voyeurs, separate from the world. We see why later in the book. When we see death, who, like us, observes the world as a ghost, never interacting with it properly. We observe death in the same way death observes the world.

Then, in the final parts of the book, the feeling shifts. As death manifests physically into the world, we feel that too. As if the book has pulled us into the world and is letting us walk through it as a local rather than float through like a ghost. It is beautifully done. And finally, at the very end, death decides to stay in that physical world. Leaving her old ghostly world behind. At the very end, that is what we must do too. With no more story to read, we must return to our physical world and leave behind Saramago's world.

Conclusion

A fantastic book. I had never read Saramago before, but this book has convinced me that I ought to. I am sure this book will end up on my list of 100 books to last a lifetime.