On New Year’s Day, in an unidentified country, everyone suddenly stops dying. Disease still strikes, accidents still happen, the elderly get even more so, but everyone just keeps on ticking.
Havoc ensues, but it is very funny havoc, if you go in for dark social satire. The funeral workers are in a tizzy. The government is scrambling to placate the voices of the newly-irrelevant health care industry. The church is trying to interpret doctrine now that there’s no afterlife. About the only folks enjoying the chaos are– this is great– are the people who sell life insurance: they’ve discovered how to bilk everyone out of even more money than before.
Saramago’s delightfully nasty assessment of society constitutes the first part of the book. Then, just when you’ve had your fill of cynicism and allegory, along comes… a romance novel?
Yeah, I wasn’t expecting it, either.
It seems that no one’s dying anymore because Death is on holiday. It’s the same idea Terry Pratchett used in Reaper Man, only this time Death is a lady. After a restful few months away from the job, she resumes her duties, thereby restoring normalcy to society with one stroke of the scythe. There’s just one catch: now that she’s killing people again, she faces an ethical quandary when she finds herself falling for a human who’s supposed to die.
Saramago is a joy to read. He does these delicious things with the language, or at least his translator does, though I’m guessing he’s good in his native Portuguese, too. They don’t give the Nobel Prize in Literature to just anybody.
Check the WRL catalog for Death with Interruptions
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[…] wrote about Jose Saramago‘s works some time ago, citing his dark social satire and language as reasons for his winning the Nobel […]