BiblioAddict

On headaches, neglect, interrupting death, party-poopers, the good thief, and a girl named Coraline, not Caroline:

Sigh.  I’m still here.  I’m typing through more than one kind of headache right now, but being in a crappy mood is no reason to neglect BiblioAddict for more than four days.  So!  A couple of days ago, I finished Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramago.  I figure my mood is enough of an excuse to forego my usual book review format, so instead I’ll just jump right into things:

The following day no one died.  When the clock struck twelve on New Year’s Eve in a small, South American country the people suddenly stopped dying.  The Queen Mother who, on New Year’s Eve had been taking her last breath, took another and then another, and then another.  She didn’t die.  Nor did she get well.  Drunken drivers were pulled from crashed vehicles with bodies broken beyond repair and yet they did not die.  Nor did they get well.  Families who were told that their parents or grandparents would be dead within the hour watched as they lived for a day and then another.  Pretty soon, the news began to spread.  All over the country, it was reported, an entire day had passed without one single death.

Of course, in the beginning, the country’s citizens were ecstatic.  Wahoo! they cried.  No more death!  After all, who doesn’t want to live forever?  Only a few party-poopers complained.  The funeral industry was the first.  Coffin makers, grave diggers, professional mourners, and cemetery groundskeepers were now officially out of business.  The life insurance industry was another.  After all, how could they charge for life insurance if no one died?  And then the Catholic Church complained too, for – and this is where it gets philosophical – how could there be a Church when there was no death?  Did people really need to be saved and absolved of their sins if they didn’t have to worry about their reward in heaven or their punishment in hell?

But the most worrying of all, was the complaint that came from the hospice industry because they pointed out an important fact about the cessation of death: people weren’t dying, but they were still getting old, they could still be hurt, and they could still get sick.  In other words, after a certain age (if they weren’t severely harmed before that), people would still need care.  Who, the hospice workers asked, was going to take care of all those people?

In fact, as the years progressed and the population grew older, the pyramid of life would be turned upside down with a shrinking number of younger people supporting a growing number the elderly with all of their frailties and ailments.  The social and financial ramifications of such a future would be enough to tear even the most developed countries apart.

And where was death in all of this?  What was she doing?  Had she hung up her cloak and put away her scepter for a new line of business?  Maybe.  Or just maybe she had another plan up her sleeve.  Eventually the people find out just what she’s up to, and that’s when it really gets interesting.

Jose Saramago’s Death With Interruptions is a fable with so much bubbling beneath the surface that I think it would take me at least two other reads and my critical eye glass to find everything.  But, on its surface at least, this novel was a wonderful contemplation on death and what it means to our lives.  The novel argues that, though the death of a loved one is, to say the least, a  regrettable occurrence, it is not just something we have come to accept, but something that we depend on without even fully realizing it.  We may not think about it very often, but the fact that we will no longer be, the fact that all things must come to and end, is a large part of who we are.

I enjoyed this book immensely.  I loved Saramago’s wandering sentences and his never-ending passages.  As I said before, in any other hands I probably would have hated it, but with Saramago it’s an adventure.  I did long for a stop or a period here and there, especially when the characters were talking and it got a little hard to tell who said what, but for the most part I had few complaints.  Death With Interruptions was an interesting, thought-provoking novel and one I hope to reread some time in the future.  And, as with so many other writers I’ve read this year, this was my first Saramago novel but I doubt it will be the last.

Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramago
Harcourt Trade Publishers / Oct. 6, 2008
$24.00 / 256 pps

In other news, because I’m a bad, bad girl, I’ve bought and started The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti (which Stephanie reviewed here) and Coraline by Neil Gaiman.  They’re both really good, but I think I’m liking one more than another.  I’ll tell you which one that is later.

And, you know what?  My headache’s gone!  I should have known that talking about books would make me feel better.