It has always been man's greatest aspiration to achieve immortality, but what if it actually happened? Jos?(c) Saramago's latest novel, Death with Interruptions, explores just that and discovers that there are downsides to living forever.
As in many of his works, Saramago takes a hypothetical situation and turns it into a thoughtful, exhilarating page-turner. On New Year's Day in an unspecified country, nobody is dying. While this anomaly could be interpreted as a gift from God, the same thing continues to happen each day thereafter.
At first, the public is thrilled by the news. Finally, the world's most unattainable goal had been achieved: the end of Death.
However, the situation quickly turns grim. People continue to age. The old, the terminally ill and the injured have no way of improving their conditions. Within the borders of this unknown country, those that should or want to die can't.
Meanwhile, the government worries about overpopulation and the clergy must confront the moral and spiritual ramifications of God's new policy. Philosophers bang their heads against the wall trying to interpret the ethics of immortality.
Then things start to get a little crazy. People begin to smuggle their relatives across the border so they can die. A new organization, the "maphia" (not to be confused with the mafia) jumps on this and exploits the death trade.
It is discovered by a nerdy philosopher that each species has a different angel of Death. In other words, the death of a goldfish is different than the death of a human. For some reason, the Death for humans has stopped working.
Saramago, a Nobel Prize laureate, takes his writing to the extreme. Each sentence, each word, has its own unique powers and abilities. As John Updike once said, he can take any possibly or stretch of imagination and bring it alive by hurling words at it.
He writes in a Faulkner-ian style, using sentences that span a page and constructing a fictitious country. But more importantly, he includes his own sour taste for the human condition, and what lies beyond.
Halfway through the novel Saramago introduces death (with a lowercase d) as a character - a female character. What's more astounding is the fact that she lives in the bottom of the earth, alone in a chilly apartment with only her scythe to keep her company. After stopping the act of death, death the character, later decides to visit earth as an attractive 36-year-old woman. The macabre just got sexy.
Death's experiment is perhaps a commentary of what it is like to be human. The higher our ideals, the worse we become at tearing them down.
Similar to the 2008 film Blindness, in which humans suddenly lose their ability to see, Interruptions displays the insignificance of humans in the face of large barriers. It may reveal, however, the reader's innate abilities as a human to perceive such nonsense.
The novel, albeit difficult to navigate, is an excellent read and well worth the struggle. Saramago is a truly gifted writer. At 86, one can only hope that he'll continue to produce more works of the same caliber before death comes for him. That is, if he chooses to.
Photo: Breadchastick / Wikimedia Commons
