Death with Interruptions

Death with Interruptions is a novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. It was published in 2005 in its original Portuguese, and Margaret Jull Costa's English translation appeared in 2008. In Britain it was released under the title Death at Intervals.

The story takes place in an unnamed, landlocked country at an unspecified point in the past. It opens with an extraordinary event: from midnight on 1 January, nobody dies any more. At first the population celebrates what looks like a victory over Death, but problems soon emerge. Religious authorities, philosophers and scholars can find no explanation, the Catholic Church sees one of the foundations of its dogma, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, called into question, and the health service and the funeral trade face unprecedented demographic and financial pressures. Hospitals and care homes fill up with incapacitated people who cannot die, while funeral directors fear they will run out of work.

The solution comes from the maphia, an underground group (the spelling with "ph" is meant to avoid confusion with the Mafia), which smuggles the dying across the border, where they die instantly, since death continues to work in the rest of the world. The trade grows so fast that the government itself becomes allied with these traffickers, and the country comes close to war with its neighbours.

Death then reappears as a woman, whom the novel always writes in lower case to distinguish her from the Death who will one day end the universe. Through a letter sent to the media, she announces that the experiment is over and people will die again. In an effort to kill more kindly, she will send each person a letter a week in advance. These violet-envelope missives throw the country into turmoil.

The heart of the story is the relationship between Death and a cellist who will not die. His letters keep being returned, and intrigued, she takes human form to meet him. Falling in love, she neglects her duties and begins to feel new sensations, such as the need to sleep. Her humanization, brought about by art and love, is the axis of the second part and the key to interpreting the book.

The novel is also a reflection on how society relates to death and on the hypocrisy of social conventions and formalities. Its style is typical of Saramago: long sentences, no quotation marks or dialogue dashes, commas in place of many full stops, and proper nouns written in lower case, which places the characters, Death included, on the same footing as humans.