Author:
Jose Saramago
This was a difficult decision and I debated whether I should post a review of book that I couldn’t finish. In the end, I decided to let you know what I thought about the book and you can make the decision whether it’s for you or not.
The reason I decided to consider reading this novel was that I discovered he had written the novel that movie Blindness was based on. I really enjoyed many aspects of the movie, especially how one simple crisis such as everyone going blind would crash our entire civilization. How some people retain their humanity while others revert back to their animal instincts.
Death with Interruptions has an interesting premise, a sort of Death takes holiday story but taken seriously and a debate about the real world consequences. Mr. Saramago’s story takes place in fictional country where people suddenly stop dying. All the surrounding countries people continue to die. Mr. Saramago’s explores how this affects every aspect of society.
The novel was translated from Portuguese and I not sure if this was the problem or not. Basically, to me, it was unreadable. The story itself is not confusing but the writing style is impossible to follow and gives me a headache after 15 minutes.
Dust Jacket Summary:
On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration—flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Then reality hits home—families are left to care for the permanently dying, life-insurance policies become meaningless, and funeral parlors are reduced to arranging burials for pet dogs, cats, hamsters, and parrots.
Death sits in her chilly apartment, where she lives alone with scythe and filing cabinets, and contemplates her experiment: What if no one ever died again? What if she, death with a small d, became human and were to fall in love?
What I liked:
It is only 238 pages. It has a cool cover.
What I didn’t like:
As I stated earlier, the story is not overly complex, it was the writing style that did me in. Mr. Saramago used what I like to call “run on sentence paragraphs.” Most of his sentences were as long as a paragraph and littered with a ton of commas. In Portugal, the writers must get paid by the comma instead of by word because there are at least 20 to 30 in each paragraph. Instead of using quotations, guess what is used, if you said commas, then you win the prize. One sentence could contain an entire conversation separated by commas and I eventually would lose track of who was speaking.
For example, I picked a sentence at random to give a taste (I won’t reprint the entire paragraph because it ran for 6 pages):
For two weeks, the plan worked more or less perfectly, but, after that, some of vigilantes started complaining that they were receiving threatening phone calls, warning them that, if they wanted to live a nice quiet life, they had better turn a blind eye to the clandestine traffic of the terminally ill, and even close their eyes completely if they didn’t want to add their own corpse to the number with whose surveillance they had been charged.
This is one of the shorter sentences. Maybe, it’s that he adds way too many thoughts in sentence or reverses his idea within sentences. Either way, I did not enjoy this novel and to me it was unreadable. Which is strange, Cormac McCarthy uses a similar style of writing but I don’t ever remember getting lost or confused.
Last word:
This book is not for everyone and as always, I advise that you read it yourself and form your own opinions. Let’s put it this way, The New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, John Updike, The Washington Post, LA Times all liked it and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, so to each his own.
My Rating
