Review: Death at Intervals by José Saramago | Books | The Observer
"Death at Intervals" by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Harvill Secker £12.99, pp208. José Saramago's books often revolve around One Big Idea. "Blindness" examines the consequences of an affliction that suddenly deprived nearly an entire population of sight. Perhaps his greatest novel, "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ," takes a provocative twist—Jesus was the son of Joseph, not God—to explore matters of belief, duty, and sin. His latest fiction to be translated into English is no different. "Death at Intervals" begins with a striking premise: a day without people dying. As with Kafka’s "Metamorphosis," the series of events becomes increasingly believable once the initial impossibility has occurred: complaints to the authorities from undertakers reduced to burying pets or the insurance union’s decision that life assurance policies have an 80-year term. The action shifts from high-level politics to the struggles of families whose terminally ill relatives have been frozen in agony by death’s cessation. Like many of the Portuguese Nobel laureate’s novels, this one has a fable-like quality, evident in the simplicity of the central concept and the setting—a small country with a terminally ill Queen Mother, pragmatic Prime Minister, and one state-run TV channel. But this is less an Aesopian attempt to dispense a moral lesson than a thought experiment about differing responses to the abrupt eternity of the mortal coil. "Death at Intervals" manages to touch on a range of critical contemporary debates: is the span of one’s life a defining characteristic of human beings or could we exist without mortality? Do we have the right to take our lives or help those who wish to but cannot? If we cannot even imagine death, let alone what comes after death, what point is there in religion? This is all conveyed through a distinctive, multi-voiced style skillfully maintained in Costa’s translation. Perhaps the most important question is that of death itself, or rather, herself. For death, "a morte," is feminine in gender in Portuguese, and this gender is maintained in the English translation. The small initial letter is also significant: there is a marvelous sequence in which death sends a letter of complaint to the editor of a weekly who refers to a buffet by Death; that other Death is a sight fearsome even for the local reaper, who has given the citizens of this nation a reprieve from the inevitable. Saramago’s death is more like an efficient senior librarian or a successful public-sector manager than the sinister spectre portrayed by Bengt Ekerot in Bergman’s "The Seventh Seal." Like Terry Pratchett’s memorably stoic skeleton named Mort, Saramago’s death is often very funny. Having concluded that simply snatching mortals away without warning is not only cruel but also leaves a lot of loose ends, she begins to send mini lavender warning letters. The population’s reaction is predictably hysterical, and the handwriting analyst contracted to examine the letters concludes, brilliantly, that death has the handwriting of a serial killer. Unlike Pratchett’s Death, the regional death of this novel can assume human form, especially as the strike and subsequent change in practice causes her millennia-old system to falter. Saramago admits and revels in the many absurdities that this raises: where would death get her handbags, for instance? And where did she keep her change before she got said handbag? With the shift from skeleton to human being comes the most profound turning point in the novel, as with the flesh that allows her to pass unnoticed among us mortals come additional characteristics as well: curiosity, anxiety, even appetite. As well as being an artistic modern legend, a broad satire on political life, and a philosophical inquiry, this is also, briefly, a touching love story. Love stories ask what it is that brings lovers together and, by extension, what it is that makes us human. The clichéd, indirect answer is that it is love that makes us human. While love may be part of death’s transformation, she discovers something else to be the mortal’s secret. As Saramago suggests, near the end of his brilliant, hopeful novel, a death that sleeps is not death at all.
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