Death With Interruptions by José Saramago – Review

Death with Interruptions by José Saramago

The “to be sure” clause: Saramago is 85 now and owes us nothing. And this novel has many pleasures. There is the author’s shrewd ironic voice, distinctive even in translation. “Death With Interruptions” begins at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve of an unstated year, when the people of an unnamed country — it feels as if we are in a land with Portugal’s political history and South America’s geography — suddenly stop dying. People now languish but never quite pass away. No one knows why. Saramago’s narrators are often clerks of some sort, lifers, men who have stayed alive by staying out of the way. They are rarely named. Where others would see magic realism, they see stratagems and counterstratagems, the threat that people will game the system. Here the narrator querulously objects to the passing of an era when “there were people who died in full compliance with the rules.”

Book Review – ‘Death With Interruptions,’ by José Saramago. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa – Review – NYTimes.com.