Death At Intervals

One day, without warning, people stop dying. This is the premise of this absurd and funny, yet elegant fable, a satire if I may. The series of events which are the consequences of this what-if situation are written in a way so believable: the church becomes irrelevant for “how can there be resurrection without death”; the funerary industry has been reduced to burying pets; life insurance suddenly has no meaning that insurance union decides that life assurance policies will have an 80-year term; the rise of mafia (spelled “maphia” in the book) whose business is related to transporting people in suspended death to the boarder where they can die; and so on. When natural order of things has been restored after seven months, i.e., when people start to die again, death, who is a woman, who, according to handwriting analysts, has the handwriting of a serial killer, starts to mail notice of death in violet paper. Her dilemma starts when one of such notices is “returned to sender.” This will lead the book to a funny and humane ending – a death that sleeps is no death at all.

I really laughed hard at the ending.

In Death At Intervals, Jose Saramago used the same style he used in his previous novels. This, however, is more accessible than some of his previous works. This book is the same book which has been released with the title, Death With Interruptions.

{May 19, 2009}