DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS
José Saramago
Harcourt
Fiction
ISBN: 9780151012749
Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature, recently (and infamously) remarked that American readers and writers are "too isolated, too insular" for an American author to win the Nobel in the foreseeable future. Proponents of American literature have rightly been outraged, sending Engdahl recommended reading lists of some of the best the United States literary community has to offer.
One thing few Americans can quibble with, however, is Engdahl's observation that too little international literature is available in translation in the United States, a point that was borne out when Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the Nobel earlier this month. Almost none of Le Clézio's works are available in the U.S. In addition, only about three percent of books published in the U.S. each year are works in translation. Is it possible that American readers are isolated after all?
Fortunately, one of the benefits when a non-English-speaking author does win the Nobel is that his or her subsequent works are likely to be among that three percent of publications that are available to U.S. audiences in translation. One of these authors is José Saramago, a Portuguese novelist and playwright who won the Nobel in 1998 and whose 1995 novel BLINDNESS has experienced great popularity in the United States, to the point of being turned into a feature film. Now, with DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS (originally published in the Portuguese in 2005), he offers Americans looking to read beyond their borders an opportunity to discover what the European literary scene is all about. Oh, and it's a great story to boot.
Saramago's novel is set in an unnamed country where, on the first day of the new year, people cease to die. Those who were, so to speak, at death's door are permanently stuck in the doorway. Those who are declared "lost causes" by doctors following car crashes and other accidents somehow pull through. At first, people rejoice at the prospect of living, so it seems, forever. Soon, however, the philosophical implications and practical realities of the situation set in. "It's hard to understand," Saramago writes, "why no one saw at once that the disappearance of death, apparently the peak, the pinnacle, the supreme happiness, was not, after all, a good thing."
Not only are there practical matters: What will happen to the funeral industry and the life insurance market? How will nursing homes cope with the constant influx of new residents when the oldest ones fail to…move on? How can families practically and emotionally continue to care for terminally ill family members indefinitely? There are also philosophical considerations: What are the implications for religion, which forms its entire belief system on the concept of death and rebirth? What are the national implications when a single country's inhabitants fail to die, even though their neighboring nations continue to live and die as they have for millennia?
Saramago eloquently and cleverly explores these provocative notions in a combination of philosophical discussions among religious, governmental and business leaders, as well as vignettes that illustrate the impact of the absence of death on individuals and families. After introducing these big ideas in ways both playful and profound, Saramago introduces the central character of his novel: death herself. After witnessing the chaos that has ensued, she settles on a different policy (which, in truly modern fashion, she conveys in the form of a manifesto to be shared with the media). But she didn't bargain on what proves to be a very personal connection with a cellist, one of her intended targets.
Reading DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS will require a few adjustments for many American readers. Translator Margaret Jull Costa has impressively translated Saramago's dense prose, which is notable for its long, often convoluted sentences and paragraphs that can stretch for dozens of pages. Mastering this prose style, however, and engaging fully in the complex philosophical questions presented here requires readers to be fully intellectually engaged with the book, and the result is a challenging but exhilarating reading experience. Perhaps American publishers have lulled American readers into not only isolation but also intellectual complacency.
DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS is a novel of ideas that also has at its heart a compelling storyline. This is the kind of literature in translation that might finally cure Americans of their insularity.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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